Dog-directed speech is an interesting cross cultural phenomenon covered in both the popular press and within the scientific community. In this paper, I will analyze the difference in portrayal between these two publishing genres. The popular press article on dog directed speech attempts to dissuade readers from using in it by drawing from multiple sources that state its inutility. In contrast, the scientific article attempts to debunk the current mode of explanation for dog and child directed speech through a structured experiment. This key difference in the two texts seems to be attributable to the text’s intended purpose and target audience. The popular press article claims that dog directed speech has no real function (Nakashima, 2017). …show more content…
It was conducted with four women and their dogs (Treiman, 1982). The women were between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-two; two of them had young children and two did not. The participants were asked to bring their dogs in for a task based, intelligence test. Before going in, researchers had each participant sit with their dog in a waiting room. To promote speech, researchers told the owners to ‘prepare’ their dog for the test. They recorded both dog-directed speech in the waiting room and researcher-directed speech during the task. Then, researchers visited the participant’s homes for a debrief and recorded more utterances. After that, they performed an analysis of dog-directed versus researcher-directed speech. They found that dog-directed speech tended to be shorter, more well formed, and repetitive. In addition, dog-directed speech was characterized by more imperative sentences and a low proportion of deictic utterances. Thus, the researchers noted that “doggerel” and “motherese” share many similar properties. From that, researchers believed that “motherese” is not elicited in response a child’s linguistic level but rather some other component because if it were, then “doggerel” should be even more simplified. They found that the main differences between “doggerel” and “motherese" was increased levels of deixis and heightened responsiveness to minimal input in “motherese". In turn, Treiman et al concluded that “motherese" does not arise from the linguistic characteristics of the listener but rather out of social