How many words of dog language do you know?
Oh, that’s right, dogs aren’t supposed to have a language with words. They merely have a communication system, where their barks, whines, growls, raised heads and wagging tails are simple expressions of emotion, but nothing to do with words. What a relief!
But what if it isn’t true? What if dogs have a language of their own, with gestures, growls, and barks that are the equivalent of words and sentences? What then?
Scientists who have been interested in knowing whether animals have language have often tried a back-door approach. If you can teach an animal a human language (or something artificial made up by people) then it might imply that the animal has the cognitive capacity to have a language of its own. No guarantee, of course, but at least it shows the possibility.
To this end, we have had studies of teaching sign language to chimps (such as Washoe), teaching keyboard symbols to bonobos (such as Kanzi), teaching English words to parrots (such as Alex), and teaching artificial gestural and sound languages to dolphins (such as Akeakamai and Phoenix).
And what do you know, they all can understand, and some can or could communicate back to the experimenters, much to the chagrin of the naysayers who insist that language is exclusively the property of people.
As far as dogs go, a group of scientists reported in 2004 that the Border Collie Rico could understand 200 words, and if given a task of retrieving an object whose name Rico did not know from among a group of objects whose names he did know, he could make the intellectual leap and assume that the unknown name that was given stood for the one object whose name he did not know.
Now comes an article in the scientific literature about a Border Collie called Chaser, who knows more than 1000 words (Pilley, J.W. and A. K. Reid, 2011. Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents. Behavioural Processes, doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007).
Over a three-year period, Chaser learned the names of more than 1000 objects (specifically, 1022 objects), which were all proper nouns relating to stuffed toys, Frisbee-like objects, or balls. Like Rico, she could retrieve an object whose name she did not know, when she was asked to find that object from among a series of objects whose names she knew. She could also understand broad categories, such as “toy”, “ball”, and “Frisbee” and could correctly select the right kind of object when told to fetch, for example, a “ball” from a selection of objects that included a number of other things.
Even more impressive, for those of us whose dogs chew our slippers, is that Chaser learned to distinguish between “toy” and “non-toy” when the objects were very similar. Toys were things she was allowed to play with. Non-toys were similar objects that she could see but was not allowed to touch, such as cloth animals, balls, dolls, or shoes that were visible to her. So she generalized the categories “toy” and “non-toy” by function: “toys” were things she was allowed to play with, and “non-toys” were things she was forbidden to touch.
It looks like Chaser could understand a lot of what was said to her. The experimenters did not specifically test for her understanding of sentences, but when they told her: “Fetch the ball,” that pretty-much implies that she could understand sentences at some level.
So much for the argument that dogs only understand your tone of voice.
And by the way, how many words of dog language do you know?
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