Our cutesy cringey dog voices could be practical. Humans are much faster ‘talkers’ than dogs, with a speech rate of about 4 syllables per second, while dogs growl, bark, woof, and whine at about 2 vocalisations per second. We change our speech and tempo to match what dogs can process.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002789

From the linked article:

Our cutesy ‘dog voices’ might not just be because we’re overwhelmed with love, according to international researchers who say it might help our dogs understand us better. The team analysed the vocal sounds of 30 dogs, as well as analysing the sounds of 27 humans across five languages speaking to other people, and 22 humans across those languages speaking to dogs. They also looked at the brain responses to speech in humans and dogs. They found humans are much faster ‘talkers’ than dogs, with a speech rate of about four syllables per second, while dogs growl, bark, woof, and whine at about two vocalisations per second. The brain scans also found dogs were more responsive to specific slower rhythms than we usually speak. The results imply we could change our speech and tempo to match what our little besties can process, the team says.