I’ve had a few people tell me that although the dog and the person are both imagining the same thing - going for a walk, and all that that entails - the dog is merely associating the sound of the phrase with the activity.
But… isn’t that… what language is? What’s qualitatively different between the human and the dog here? The human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it’s all just “sound = thing”, no? 🤔
I don’t speak Spanish, but I know that when I hear someone say something that sounds like “andallay!”, it means “hurry up”. I don’t know what the word literally means, or how to actually spell it (well, I do now that I looked it up: ándale), or its etymology or whether or not it’s a loan word from Chinese, but I know from experience (and cartoons) that it means “go faster”. Am I a dog to a Mexican in this scenario? My understanding is as perfunctory as my dog’s understanding of “go for a walk” is. But we wouldn’t say that I’m not using language when I react appropriately to the “ándale!” instruction.
What am I not getting?
Cheers!
That is exactly what language is. Someone makes a sound and you know what it means. Animals can’t reason the fine details of what the meaning of words or context mean. The understand if A happens it means (action), and they do respond to the tone of your voice. Say the same thing in a different tone and it becomes confusing. An example is, if I angrily yell words in French at you (which you don’t speak), even though those words mean “happy, joy, sunshine”, you think I’m angry. But if I cuss at you in French in a super sweet voice, you think I’m being romantic. Humans, can speak non-native languages and not know how to read or write them.
I had this realization some days ago and am nearly ashamed to say that because it took me some decades to think of it.
My dogs know very well what cheese means.
My dogs understand the phrase “let’s go” and can understand it as a combined phrase such as “let’s go for a walk”, “let’s go outside”, “let’s go upstairs”. People very much underestimate dogs’ ability to truly understand human language.
I even had a very experienced and highly regarded dog trainer recently tell me that commands should ideally be single-syllable. Maybe, but certainly not due to any limitation in the dog’s ability to understand longer words and phrases. I can even be cuddling with the dogs on the couch, say, “I need to pee”, and they go running off to the bathroom (have to protect me, I guess).
I thought all dogs were smarter than people thought because my first one (Yorkie) was practically a little kid in how he could understand me. I could tell him to go somewhere and he’d do it. He let me know if he needed to pee outside or if he was hungry. Always surprised me how much a dog could understand!
Then I got a new one recently (Goldendoodle) and this little guy is a complete dumbass.
I suspect it may come down to experience though. Yorkie was already about 4 when we got him and only took about a year for me and him to really understand each other. The Doodle we got when he was only a little over a month old and we’ve had him close to a year but it has been a pain to train. Could also just be down to personality, because he has done some pretty intelligent things that surprised us.
Some personality for sure, also a year old is still quite young for a dog, he’s probably still battling those dogly instincts.
A huge part of it is talking with your dogs, training your dogs, and being consistent.
The more you talk to your dog, being careful to use consistent language, the more it will understand. And the more it will focus on you, which is good for behavior in general.
human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it’s all just “sound = thing”, no? 🤔
The understanding of this complex and expressive structure is significant because it allows you to convey novel or abstract information. You will not be able to explain what a walk is to a dog without a demonstration, while you will be able to do so (to some degree) to the unfortunate hypothetical person who have never taken one before.
I think it’s more you as a person understand that the sentence is that, a sentence. You understand how the sentence is made, why it means what it means, not just what it means.
The dog only understands the what.
Doesn’t mean you still can’t help teach dogs to communicate. Even saw a segment recently on PBS about dogs learning to use buttons that produce words and using them to make short sentences to communicate with their owners.
I think what you’re not getting is that dogs are neurologically wired different from humans, and so experience the world differently.
So a dog’s sense of self is different from a human’s, its sensory inputs are different, and its language processing is different.
It’s kind of like those AI models a decade or so back that were really good at identifying where a picture was taken — and then it turned out they’d mapped the relationship between the geolocation numbers in the EXIF data and weren’t looking at the image data at all.
I asked my neighbor’s dog. He said, “Woof”.
Nope, you’ve got the hang of it.
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No other animal has even come close to creating such a close co-existence with humans.
Horses are at least close
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I think you’re right. The only discrepancy I can think of might be that you implicitly know that “andalley” has meaning and context beyond what you currently understand and ascribe to it. A dog probably doesn’t think too hard about whether walking is the action of moving one’s legs or the state of being outside.
I found a study that suggests you’re corect and dogs can differentiate between words and syllabis and can progress them similar to us, much worse though.
This study provides the first electrophysiological evidence, to our knowledge, for word processing in dogs, revealing its temporal dynamics. Dogs’ ERP responses did not differentiate instruction words (WORDS) and phonetically similar nonsense words (SIMILAR), but ERP for both WORDS and SIMILAR was different from ERP for phonetically dissimilar nonsense words (NONSENSE). This suggests that dogs process instruction words differently from dissimilar nonsense words.
Dogs listened to commands (sit and come) and their modified versions in which phonemes were changed. Dogs noted the difference in alternation of both the first consonants (e.g. [tʃɪt] instead of sit) and the vowels (e.g. [sæt] instead of sit), as shown by the decline of responses to the alternated commands. Based on research on human infants, we have also no reason to assume that the vowel manipulation we applied here (swapping [i], [ɒ] and [ɛ] across conditions in the first vowel position) would be perceptually less salient than the consonant manipulation applied by Mills et al.
If the sentence is garbled/muffled, which I will poorly attempt to represent in text by
l__'s g_ for _ wa__
a human is likely to still understand it. A dog would not (I assume, I am no dog researcher). So, a human’s understanding of the “correct” ungarbled sounds is not the same as a dogs, otherswise the dog would understand the garbled sounds.
