Why do humans use ‘baby voice’ when we speak to pets?

By Antonia Goetz, Research Fellow Infant Studies, Western Sydney University
Zhen (Jenny) Zeng, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University

You walk in a park. Children are playing, people are walking their dogs, and then you hear someone: “Who’s my little sweetie?” You turn around expecting to see a pram. But someone is sitting beside a dog, speaking in the same voice they would use with a baby.

It’s not in your head. The way we speak to babies is very similar to the way we speak to our pets – and research confirms this.

So why do we do this? And do pets even care?

The useful features of baby-talk

For pets and babies,…

Read complete article

~	A decade of Pokémon Go: how nostalgia and community keep the game alive

~	How medieval Scottish kings kept unrest at bay with populist policies

~	The difference between heat exhaustion and heatstroke explained

~	New tech adds phone tracking to license plate readers, associating devices with identifiable cars

~	Emerging anti-immigration sentiment in Japan obscures a surprising history of strategic engagement with Islam

~	The forgotten racial history of Alligator Alcatraz

~	How state constitutions became the battleground for American rights and liberties – on both the left and right

~	Concierges, adjunct professors, potato chip tasters: US employers are relying more and more on ‘disposable’ workers

~	Elvish, Klingon and Pig Latin: what can invented languages teach us about the human brain?

~	View from The Hill: government shuts down telehealth-for-VAD bill, defying Labor conference