ArticleAnimal cognition2021
Horses are sensitive to baby talk: pet-directed speech facilitates communication with humans in a pointing task and during grooming.
Article in Animal cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Human ostension enhances attentiveness but not performance in domestic pigs.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Discrimination of cat-directed speech from human-directed speech in a population of indoor companion cats (Felis catus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Pet-directed speech improves horses' attention toward humans.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- It Keeps the Good Boy Healthy from Nose to Tail: Understanding Pet Food Attribute Preferences of US Consumers.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Horses with sustained attention follow the pointing of a human who knows where food is hidden.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Enhanced Understanding of Horse-Human Interactions to Optimize Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Article
- Your phrases matter: Third waves in research approaches and new contexts for formulaic language.International journal of language & communication disordersArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Pet-directed speech (PDS) is a type of speech humans spontaneously use with their companion animals. It is very similar to speech commonly used when talking to babies. A survey on social media showed that 92.7% of the respondents used PDS with their horse, but only 44.4% thought that their horse was sensitive to it, and the others did not know or doubted its efficacy. We, therefore, decided to test the impact of PDS on two tasks. During a grooming task that consisted of the experimenter scratching the horse with their hand, the horses (n = 20) carried out significantly more mutual grooming gestures toward the experimenter, looked at the person more, and moved less when spoken to with PDS than with Adult-directed speech (ADS). During a pointing task in which the experimenter pointed at the location of a reward with their finger, horses who had been spoken to with PDS (n = 10) found the food significantly more often than chance, which was not the case when horses were spoken to with ADS (n = 10). These results thus indicate that horses, like certain non-human primates and dogs are sensitive to PDS. PDS could thus foster communication between people and horses during everyday interactions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.