Johnson
Woofs the word
The desire to nd language in mans best friend overlooks what makes a dog a dog
Apr 24th 2021 | words 802
THE BROWS seem to furrow. The face turns to the ground. Nearby, your shoes lie in tatters. You knowsimply knowthat your dog is ashamed of having destroyed your only decent pair, and is meekly trying to tell you so.
Dogs faces seem to beg to be interpreted. And lots of humans cannot resist interpreting them in the terms delimited by human languages. A puppy licking your cheek enthusiastically is bestowing a kiss. A dog using its body with no apparent practical goal is playing. If they could speak like their owners, many humans want to know, what would their dogs have to say?
Into the market for answers step Christina Hunger, author of the forthcoming book How Stella Learned to Talk, and Alexis Devine, the owner of Bunny, a canine TikTok star with over 6.3m followers and 130m likes. After careful training, both Stella and Bunny can paw a series of buttons that make a recorded voice speak one of several dozen programmed words. Both Ms Devine and Ms Hunger claim that their dogs string meaningful sequences together: that they are using language.
Human linguists tend to be sceptical of talking animals. To understand why, consider Noam Chomskys devastating review in 1959 of Verbal Behaviour by B.F. Skinner, a pioneer in behavioural psychologya pivotal exchange at the birth of modern linguistics. Skinner described human language acquisition as he did other learned behaviours: the strengthening of a response after conditioning with a stimulus. If saying food gets you food, youre more likely to say it.
Mr Chomsky took Skinners conditioning mechanisms to their absurd conclusions. Skinner wrote that if we are shown a prized work of art and exclaim Beautiful!, the speed and energy of the response will not be lost on the owner. Mr Chomsky noted that this reasoning might lead people to shriek Beautiful in a loud, high-pitched voice, repeatedly, and with no delay. Real humans, by contrast, might in fact show appreciation through a long moment of silence, and then a barely murmured compliment.
People use words in many odd ways. They talk about things that are not the case and hypothesise about things that might be. They make jokes. Dogs like Stella, by contrast, do indeed act a lot like Skinners conditioned beings. They press a button that says outside when they want to go outside; unsurprisingly, rewards strengthen the drive to comply.
Ms Hunger came up with her button system after working with children who were not developing language normally. The field of Alternative and Augmentative Communication has helped many youngsters express themselves better (often with tablet computers), to their relief and their families. But some dog experts dislike the practice of foisting word-based communication onto pooches. By focusing on a basic kind of language that seems humanat least in Skinners viewit neglects dogs abilities to express themselves in their own ways.
Though novice dog-owners are sometimes embarrassed by the habit, they quickly become used to their new companions fondness for sniffing the behinds of other dogs, who reciprocate. The animals are using exquisitely sensitive noses and anal glands to exchange information, about age, health and sexual readiness, among other things. Dogs urinate frequently not, as once assumed, primarily to claim territory, but to leave similar bulletins for others.
Posture, too, conveys masses of information between dogs: stance, hackles, eyes, ears and teeth contribute to a range of messages transmitted between them. Finally, their own vocalisations, though hardly of the words-and-syntax type that make up human utterances, are more sophisticated than the Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! many humans hear. Barks, growls, murmurs and whines vary widely.
Impartial scientists have yet to report on the talking abilities of dogs like Stella and Bunny (though Bunny is being studied at the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego). In the meantime, ordinary owners can have a go at training their dogs with the advice Ms Hunger offers. Or they can try another approach: buy one of the many good books on understanding how dogs naturally communicate, and spend the time they might invest in programming buttons on getting to know their pets instead. Having another species in the house is fascinating as well as fun. Even the best-trained dog is a poor conversationalist in human termsbut a brilliant one on their own.
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