7 ms·

Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

43 points by amichail 2y ago

crooked-v 2y ago
So where are all the people who apparently think that pets can't understand basic vocabulary? It's treated like some wild revelation when it comes up in articles like this, but anyone who's ever had a dog or cat knows what the reactions are like when words like "walk" or "bath" or "tuna" get mentioned. For particularly attentive dogs you can even end up with the euphemism treadmill from "walk" to "W-A-L-K" to substituting other phrases to keep them from realizing what you're talking about.
- amichail 2y ago
  The article talks about having dogs talk back by pressing buttons for various words.
  - brudgers 2y ago
    Maybe buttons are necessary when humans don't understand dog words? Or to put it another way, buttons demonstrate dogs being multilingual across species...
    - observationist 2y ago
      Words are a human construct - language. Dogs don't naturally have words or language - there's no bark that conveys a static meaning. They do correlate noises, like whines, barks, growls, with things they have experience with, and are clever enough to string complex and abstract concepts together. That level of reasoning and communication is not language, however. What the buttons demonstrate is that dogs are capable of learning and using language. Complex concepts, like fire being hot and dangerous, yet needed to keep the house warm, so start the fire before the walk (a recent Bunny episode.) This goes beyond Cesar Milan being the dog whisperer and into something novel. For the first time, we have dogs and other animals demonstrating that they can learn words and rules of grammar, connecting sequences of words together to form a specific meaning. That means a dog can say "go walk later" "ouch paw" and so forth, and bring about some sort of reaction from their human that would have been impossible without buttons. In the study they've been doing, dogs have demonstrated the capacity for humor, combining the semantics of different words to create new words, assigning nicknames, and stringing together upwards of 5 words to express a coherent idea. This should cause us all to stop and question whether our perception of animals needs changing. To all appearances, any mammal, or animal with functionality comparable to a neocortex, is capable of using language. Cows, pigs, horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, and all sorts of other animals have learned to use these button systems. Birds and primates have long been known to use sign language, able to understand spoken words and respond with fairly intelligent and complex language of their own. Bears, lions, dolphins, orcas, and whales are likely to be among the most intelligent and linguistically facile creatures aside from humans. Perhaps the neural structure imposed by learning language results in a significant shift in capacity. When you consider feral humans, and the extreme difficulties they have with language acquisition, and then think on Helen Keller's description of language and communication resulting in her becoming conscious and aware, maybe teaching language to these animals is inducing a real change in consciousness, providing them the foundations of a life and experience with which we can directly empathize. Courts recently ruled against elephants being people - well, we should take a hard look at what "people" really means. Mysticism and religious traditions aren't sufficient in a world inhabited by science. Humans aren't people "because God said so" or "the holy book says all other animals are lesser." We are where we are because our brains, mouths, hands, and eyes give us an advantage in controlling our environments. Left feral, we're often no more capable or extraordinary than other primates. Given culture, education, and language, and humanity becomes some significantly more powerful and impactful in the world. Giving dogs language probably isn't going to result in dogs writing blogs, or horses filing legal briefs, but humans could establish a culture that lifts them up, empowers them, and provides a set of tools by which dogs (and other animals) are able to express more agency and have a much more potent impact on the world. For example, imagine a standardized education for dogs, in which a set of 100 words are taught to them as puppies, consistently modeled. This would mean that almost any dog you encounter would have a shared means of communication - for dogcatchers, that'd be a pretty good deal. It'd also mean "yes, good friend. come treat." or similar phrases might be used to put a dog at ease. Most dog attacks happen because you have a terrified animal in an unpredictable situation, and all the dog knows is how to react with fear and aggression. Layering communication into that definitely wouldn't solve everything, but hey, it'd be a lot better than nothing. I can't wait for Cesar or a comparably talented trainer to grab on to the dog button trend; there's a subtle but deep difference between being greeted by a flurry of wiggles and joyful bouncing, and all the wiggles and bouncing with "Dad hi love you play" or "Mom friend human".
      - bitwize 2y ago
        What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach". This is like when Alex the parrot was confronted with an apple for the first time and called it a "banerry", using the names of fruits he knew (banana and cherry). The ability not just to use words, but form original linguistic constructs in response to novel situations, is something we humans long thought was our domain alone, but it turns out we share it with far more birds and beasts than we realize even today.
        inglor_cz 2y ago
        "What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach"." This is actually something that the skeptics should address when they claim that all that button pushing is just simple conditioning. Spontaneously creating a logically sound approximation for a broken button doesn't sound like conditioning at all.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        I think it is rather up to those making the claims to show that these stories are more than just selection bias.
        inglor_cz 2y ago
        How should such a study even look like? I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        I don't think I would want to design such a study, but at a minimum arguments would have to be made ahead of time for meaningful pairings "outside-water" == "beach", all button presses would have to be recorded, and then a statistical conclusion could be reached. > I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs. Indeed. So whatever such a study concludes is unlikely to change people's ideas about dogs much.
    - hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
      My dog used to get really worked up and bite me when she wanted something, so I started teaching to answer my questions. So, when she wants something, she sits in front of me and I start asking: What do you want? Food? <pause> Water? <pause> Poop? When I reach the word, she bumps on me with the front paws. I guess this is the equivalent of the soundboard.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    It's easy to see button board claims that are questionable, when it gets into complex phrases or things that need grammatical rules to make sense. But I wouldn't expect basic button use to be controversial.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  A relative had a dog who understood "b-i-r-d" spelled out....
- not_the_fda 2y ago
  Lots of people think animals are dumb beasts. My neighbor threw a party with a bunch of people in his PhD program. Our dogs hang out and we left the gate open between our properties so the dogs could go back and forth. One of the PhD students was amazed that if you threw a ball over the fence the dog knew how to go around the fence and through the gate to get the ball.
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    They can certainly learn things like using gates, however they don't seem to have a concept of object permanence. If they go to the other side of the fence and do not find the ball, they will tend to begin a spiraling search for it, rather than concentrate on where the ball logically should be if you tracked the trajectory of it and formed a concept of where it went even after it left your sight.
    - KittenInABox 2y ago
      Dogs obviously have a concept of object permanence, since they know to go around the fence to look for a ball in the first place. They wouldn't look for it once it's left their sight around a fence otherwise. That they're confused if they cannot immediately find the ball only shows that they struggle to calculate arcs, which many humans also do.
      - AnotherGoodName 2y ago
        And for anyone with a particularly intelligent but ball obsessed breed of dog you can ask them to get the ball so you can play and they’ll go from the front of the house around the back to pick it up off the top shelf in the shed where you placed it (but forgot yourself, but they remembered) and bring it to you. I absolutely assure you: My border collie knows at all times where the ball is. There’s zero question of object permanance.
        lesuorac 2y ago
        I swear people who talk about object permanence have never tested it. The Wikipedia article about babies even talks about it not starting until month 8 [1]! At least, under "Contradicting evidence" they talk about other studies that showed as early as 3 months ... I think people just want to feel special and just can't accept that other animals have the same abilities that we do. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Stages
- RajT88 2y ago
  My dog growing up learned "W-A-L-K" after a while, and we switched to Pig Latin. Possibly by the time he could have learned it, he was pretty old. My current dog knows the basic ones like, "walk", "outside", "lunch", etc.
- romanhn 2y ago
  I can believe it with dogs, but my cat of almost 20 years has never indicated any understanding of or interest in human speech. She sometimes reacts to tone of voice, sometimes to specific noises (like treat baggie crumbling when opened), but not any particular words. Half the time she could care less about the tone or noises as well. That seems pretty in line with my general understanding of cat "psychology".
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Gary Larson expressed this best: https://www.marketingfirst.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/gary-larson-what-we-say-to-dogs-what-dogs-hear.jpg https://www.marketingfirst.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/...
  - kxrm 2y ago
    Anecdotal but I have trained a cat to understand certain words. I doubt she ever was able to contextualize the language, but she would react to specific words related to treats. In addition to that she would react to her name. Not in the same way a dog would but she would look at you when you said her name. I think with dogs it definitely comes more easily. Training a cat takes a lot more persistence since they do not have the same social tools as dogs.
- deleted 2y ago
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- andrewla 2y ago
  Agreed; this is the default belief of anyone who has interacted with a dog. If someone were to advance the thesis that dogs were incapable of understanding words I would require some pretty strong evidence before I would believe them. The soundboard stuff in the article -- not so much. Training a dog to press a button is simple conditioning, but implying any sort of understanding of the language is a bit of a stretch. It sounds like the referenced research (I haven't read the paper) only tests the other way around (that dogs can understand some speech). If you can show me a dog trained to understand "stand on the yellow bench" and similar commands, but never actually hearing the specific command "sit on the red chair" and being able to execute that, then maybe I'm interested, but otherwise a dog hitting a button that says "I love you" is great for instagram but is indistinguishable from a button that says "look at me and pet me please".
  - gmalette 2y ago
    Look into Bunny the sheepadoodle https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny?igsh=cHNtZTk0Y3dsNDY1 https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny?igsh=cHNtZTk0Y3dsND.... She makes consistent phrases like “look look outside squirrel” or “dad upstairs poop”.
- govideo 2y ago
  Reminds me of when I was in 3rd grade, I told my teacher that some birds (parrots) can really understand words. He flat out laughed at me in front of the whole class, and said No Way. I quietly disagreed with him. When I got home, I told the story to my bird :)
- gspencley 2y ago
  This speaks to an interesting question that is extremely difficult to answer: "Can pets think conceptually?" A word like "table", to a human, does not represent a concrete. It represents an abstraction, ALL tables, all things that have a flat surface and four legs. When a dog hears "table", or "walk", do they understand the abstract concept of walking, or tables in general? Or do they interpret it as a very specific, concrete verb or noun? That is the 6 million dollar question when it comes to an animal's ability to truly, genuinely understand spoken language. This is also why some philosophers conclude that animals cannot reason (it's a hypothesis, though, we don't know). Reason requires abstract thought and being able to prove that an animal is capable of abstract thinking is incredibly difficult.
  - ajuc 2y ago
    What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. When I was with my dog in my parents' house and said "spacer" (walk in Polish) - he was happy and jumped around in anticipation, bringing the leash. He did the same in my grandparents house even though we weren't going to the same place - he just wanted to go on a walk doesn't matter the area. What's your explanation that does not involve abstracting the action from the concrete area and time? Another example - my sister trained our other dog to bring her plush toys on command. She hidden them in house and said "szukaj" (search) and then rewarded the dog with a clicker and/or a treat when the dog brought her the toy. It takes several steps (first you hide the toy very close and then you hide it outside of view). Also you reward the dog with the clicker on intermediate successes like getting the toy without bringing it to the owner. Anyway - one time my sister lost one glove when we were on a walk with that dog. She noticed only when we were returning from the fields. She gave the dog the other glove to sniff and said "szukaj". Ciri (our dog) went back a few hundred meters searching for the glove and found it and brought it back. There are smarter and dumber dogs (Ciri was probably the smartest dogs we ever had) - but the ability to generalize and reason is obviously there. Like - I can't imagine an unbiased scientist having a dog for extended period of time and not seeing it. Dogs also have theory of mind (I've seen Ciri bury a bone in one place, wait for our other dog - Jaskier - to go home, and rebury it elsewhere). Dogs also know which things are forbidden, and know that the things that are forbidden - aren't forbidden when nobody's there to see them do it :) We also had a pretty aggressive dog before that - Kuba - which used to pursue neighbors cat when it came to our backyard. The backyard was fenced, and when the cat could see our dog - he wouldn't come. So our dog pretended to be asleep or hidden and waited for the cat to come, then he pursued it up a tree and waited under the tree till we came to free the cat. This requires reasoning. It shouldn't be surprising - these are social animals that hunt in packs, cooperate, play pack politics, and need to reason about others in their pack and about the prey. How would they survive as a species if they had to invent pack tactics from scratch every time they hunted? Obviously they can generalize. I find most of these arguments against animals thinking either incredibly naive or biased. Like some people actually argue dogs are "meat automatons" with no capacity to think whatsoever. It's like fishers saying fish can't feel pain :/
dhosek 2y ago
The author Mary Robinette Kowal has a cat, Elsie, who uses a button board. I’m reluctant to call it language exactly, but it is definitely a kind of communication. An example is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C48uKZ8veql/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C48uKZ8veql/ It’s interesting how words shift in meaning with the cat, so litterbox, for example, has come to be a word for anything unpleasant. Elsie also will come up with nicknames for people she encounters relatively frequently, not always complimentary.
- philipov 2y ago
  > so litterbox, for example, has come to be a word for anything unpleasant. That's rich. It exactly mirrors how we have come to use gastronomical words such as "disgusting" for moral opprobrium. The same parts of the limbic system are used to process both concepts. Anything that's bad could be described as 'shitty' which is about as close as we can get to the same usage.
- ChoHag 2y ago
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buildbot 2y ago
Echoing others, everyone knew this but we do need to actually test and prove it. My cat knows speak, sit, 360, shake, nose kiss, and up as far as tricks go. Originally, we paired both a hand motion and the word. Now, either works. I can make the sit gesture, she’ll sit. Or just saying sit works too. She’s observed how we open our doors and now is capable of leaping up and pulling the handle herself, including a little wiggle to pull the door open enough to wedge her face through for final entry. Cats seem to use tone in their meows to tell you a lot, and while I can’t say I understand really, it’s clear when there’s a hello chirp or an upset, lower tone yowl.
pizza 2y ago
There really are all the ingredients out there for the creation of an animal-human communication model. Except maybe money and will.
- fragmede 2y ago
  People spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on their pets. I'm sure a company will come along to try and make one because holy shit you'd make a lot of money selling the app that lets your pet talk to you.
erehweb 2y ago
See also the Canadian satirical news show that claimed that dogs in Montreal would have to be bilingual. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/no-dogs-don-t-have-to-be-bilingual-in-montreal-1.1191892 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/no-dogs-don-t-have-t...
codr7 2y ago
Hmm, I'm not that sure. I did a month of quiet Yoga (no talking whatsoever) and brought my dog with me for the ride. I came to realize that the words are mostly there to help me, she doesn't care. If I switch the word and say it with the same energy/body language, the result is the same. I don't even need words anymore, body language is more effective with my dog.
- deleted 2y ago
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- bityard 2y ago
  Dogs can absolutely learn sign language for basic commands. There are books about it. We had some success with ours. The main difficulty is you do have to use some kind of sound to get their attention if they're not looking at you. (Perhaps a clap would do.)
  - codr7 2y ago
    I started snapping my fingers to get her attention.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  The researchers aimed to rule out variables such as a dog responding to their owner's cues — like, the owner putting on shoes to go outside — the identity of the human saying the word, or memorizing the location of buttons on the board.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    John W. Pilley conducted investigations involving his border collie named Chaser. Chaser had ~200 or so toys, each with a unique name; if Pilley asked her to fetch a toy by name, she would reliably find the corresponding toy out of a pile of all of them and bring it back. Pilley found that when Chaser was asked to fetch a toy whose name Chaser hadn't heard, Chaser would find the new toy she hadn't seen before in the pile and bring it back. He controlled for cues like face and body language by sitting still with his back to Chaser while giving the commands, so that he could neither see the toy being fetched nor unconsciously signal to Chaser. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog)
deleted 2y ago
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bityard 2y ago
Perhaps off-topic, but we had a dog that knew swearing when she heard it. Most dogs are well-attuned to both positive and negative emotions. In particular, when a human starts yelling and throwing things, they get the hell out of dodge. So it's obviously not a surprise that a dog would beat a hasty exit when their human emits a flurry of exasperated expletives. However, our dog took it a bit further. Before kids, my wife and I had a habit of swearing in our normal, neutral conversations. It took a while before I noticed the pattern but eventually I found that even a light and airy "well, fuck" essentially inaudibly under my breath would quite reliably cause our dog to sigh heavily, get up, and saunter out of the room with considerably more than a whiff of indignation.
throw745859 2y ago
[flagged]
- noman-land 2y ago
  There are plenty of humans that display similar lack or control when flying into a rage.
  - throw745859 2y ago
    And system knows how to deal with it. Try to walk around, attacking random people with a knife, cops would deal with you pretty fast! I have a stalker that tries to kill me every day! But I am not allowed to get restraining order against it! No! Somehow it is my responsibility not to trigger this smart noble creature! I must walk the right way (not too fast, not too slow). I am not allowed to carry items it does not like (food, babies, other animals). And it can defecate on my yard, but that is not trespassing! And any hospital bills are on my, of course! We do not tolerate drunk drivers, but dog owners without leash (about the same level of danger) are not punished!
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Raises the age-old and now-new-again-thanks-to-LLMs of the nature of the difference between recognizing sounds and understanding words. I have zero doubt that our dog can do the former. Not sure about the latter.
iLoveOncall 2y ago
The article is clearly a stark example of selection bias, ignoring all the times where the dog didn't press relevant buttons and highlighting random successes. There are countless proofs that dogs don't understand words, and it's extremely easy to demonstrate: https://youtube.com/shorts/CIDZG7bdP7k https://youtube.com/shorts/CIDZG7bdP7k
dboreham 2y ago
It's just an LLM. My cat can understand a few words.
larrik 2y ago
On the one hand, people put a lot of meaning behind things that may not have it. On the other hand, I can tell one of my dogs which room my wife is in and he'll go directly to that room to get her. My house isn't small, either. I didn't specifically train him to do that, and it doesn't even come up that often, so I don't actually know why it works.
- pjerem 2y ago
  Yeah. Dogs. It’s incredible how they can be both incredibly stupid and incredibly smart altogether.
TheLockranore 2y ago
Do we have blind confirmation? As in, do the dogs carry out volleys with people that don't know them? Dogs could be picking up body language, pheromones, and other signals rather than comprehending; without, this could be the old vaudeville act of the counting horse that stops tapping when the owner reacts.
whereistimbo 2y ago
Can dog understand numbers like 1237124? Or email like whereistimbo@outlook.com?
denimboy 2y ago
I knew a dog that had a decent vocabulary. He would visibly react to words like CAR, WALK, or PARK. He also understood PARTY and MEAT and would wag his tail for PART and lick his chops to MEAT. One time we were going to a BBQ so I explained to him we were taking the CAR to a MEAT PARTY and he got super excites, wagging his tail and going to the door all while frothing at the mouth. Anecdotal but it certainly looked like he could synthesize concepts and imagine what was going to happen in the near future. I've done a few other experiments with my foreign speaking friends and it appeared to me that dogs understand the language their owners speak primarily.

43 points by amichail 2y ago

So where are all the people who apparently think that pets can't understand basic vocabulary? It's treated like some wild revelation when it comes up in articles like this, but anyone who's ever had a dog or cat knows what the reactions are like when words like "walk" or "bath" or "tuna" get mentioned. For particularly attentive dogs you can even end up with the euphemism treadmill from "walk" to "W-A-L-K" to substituting other phrases to keep them from realizing what you're talking about.

amichail 2y ago
The article talks about having dogs talk back by pressing buttons for various words.
- brudgers 2y ago
  Maybe buttons are necessary when humans don't understand dog words? Or to put it another way, buttons demonstrate dogs being multilingual across species...
  - observationist 2y ago
    Words are a human construct - language. Dogs don't naturally have words or language - there's no bark that conveys a static meaning. They do correlate noises, like whines, barks, growls, with things they have experience with, and are clever enough to string complex and abstract concepts together. That level of reasoning and communication is not language, however. What the buttons demonstrate is that dogs are capable of learning and using language. Complex concepts, like fire being hot and dangerous, yet needed to keep the house warm, so start the fire before the walk (a recent Bunny episode.) This goes beyond Cesar Milan being the dog whisperer and into something novel. For the first time, we have dogs and other animals demonstrating that they can learn words and rules of grammar, connecting sequences of words together to form a specific meaning. That means a dog can say "go walk later" "ouch paw" and so forth, and bring about some sort of reaction from their human that would have been impossible without buttons. In the study they've been doing, dogs have demonstrated the capacity for humor, combining the semantics of different words to create new words, assigning nicknames, and stringing together upwards of 5 words to express a coherent idea. This should cause us all to stop and question whether our perception of animals needs changing. To all appearances, any mammal, or animal with functionality comparable to a neocortex, is capable of using language. Cows, pigs, horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, and all sorts of other animals have learned to use these button systems. Birds and primates have long been known to use sign language, able to understand spoken words and respond with fairly intelligent and complex language of their own. Bears, lions, dolphins, orcas, and whales are likely to be among the most intelligent and linguistically facile creatures aside from humans. Perhaps the neural structure imposed by learning language results in a significant shift in capacity. When you consider feral humans, and the extreme difficulties they have with language acquisition, and then think on Helen Keller's description of language and communication resulting in her becoming conscious and aware, maybe teaching language to these animals is inducing a real change in consciousness, providing them the foundations of a life and experience with which we can directly empathize. Courts recently ruled against elephants being people - well, we should take a hard look at what "people" really means. Mysticism and religious traditions aren't sufficient in a world inhabited by science. Humans aren't people "because God said so" or "the holy book says all other animals are lesser." We are where we are because our brains, mouths, hands, and eyes give us an advantage in controlling our environments. Left feral, we're often no more capable or extraordinary than other primates. Given culture, education, and language, and humanity becomes some significantly more powerful and impactful in the world. Giving dogs language probably isn't going to result in dogs writing blogs, or horses filing legal briefs, but humans could establish a culture that lifts them up, empowers them, and provides a set of tools by which dogs (and other animals) are able to express more agency and have a much more potent impact on the world. For example, imagine a standardized education for dogs, in which a set of 100 words are taught to them as puppies, consistently modeled. This would mean that almost any dog you encounter would have a shared means of communication - for dogcatchers, that'd be a pretty good deal. It'd also mean "yes, good friend. come treat." or similar phrases might be used to put a dog at ease. Most dog attacks happen because you have a terrified animal in an unpredictable situation, and all the dog knows is how to react with fear and aggression. Layering communication into that definitely wouldn't solve everything, but hey, it'd be a lot better than nothing. I can't wait for Cesar or a comparably talented trainer to grab on to the dog button trend; there's a subtle but deep difference between being greeted by a flurry of wiggles and joyful bouncing, and all the wiggles and bouncing with "Dad hi love you play" or "Mom friend human".
    - bitwize 2y ago
      What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach". This is like when Alex the parrot was confronted with an apple for the first time and called it a "banerry", using the names of fruits he knew (banana and cherry). The ability not just to use words, but form original linguistic constructs in response to novel situations, is something we humans long thought was our domain alone, but it turns out we share it with far more birds and beasts than we realize even today.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        "What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach"." This is actually something that the skeptics should address when they claim that all that button pushing is just simple conditioning. Spontaneously creating a logically sound approximation for a broken button doesn't sound like conditioning at all.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        I think it is rather up to those making the claims to show that these stories are more than just selection bias.
        inglor_cz 2y ago
        How should such a study even look like? I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        I don't think I would want to design such a study, but at a minimum arguments would have to be made ahead of time for meaningful pairings "outside-water" == "beach", all button presses would have to be recorded, and then a statistical conclusion could be reached. > I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs. Indeed. So whatever such a study concludes is unlikely to change people's ideas about dogs much.
  - hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
    My dog used to get really worked up and bite me when she wanted something, so I started teaching to answer my questions. So, when she wants something, she sits in front of me and I start asking: What do you want? Food? <pause> Water? <pause> Poop? When I reach the word, she bumps on me with the front paws. I guess this is the equivalent of the soundboard.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  It's easy to see button board claims that are questionable, when it gets into complex phrases or things that need grammatical rules to make sense. But I wouldn't expect basic button use to be controversial.
readthenotes1 2y ago
A relative had a dog who understood "b-i-r-d" spelled out....
not_the_fda 2y ago
Lots of people think animals are dumb beasts. My neighbor threw a party with a bunch of people in his PhD program. Our dogs hang out and we left the gate open between our properties so the dogs could go back and forth. One of the PhD students was amazed that if you threw a ball over the fence the dog knew how to go around the fence and through the gate to get the ball.
- technothrasher 2y ago
  They can certainly learn things like using gates, however they don't seem to have a concept of object permanence. If they go to the other side of the fence and do not find the ball, they will tend to begin a spiraling search for it, rather than concentrate on where the ball logically should be if you tracked the trajectory of it and formed a concept of where it went even after it left your sight.
  - KittenInABox 2y ago
    Dogs obviously have a concept of object permanence, since they know to go around the fence to look for a ball in the first place. They wouldn't look for it once it's left their sight around a fence otherwise. That they're confused if they cannot immediately find the ball only shows that they struggle to calculate arcs, which many humans also do.
    - AnotherGoodName 2y ago
      And for anyone with a particularly intelligent but ball obsessed breed of dog you can ask them to get the ball so you can play and they’ll go from the front of the house around the back to pick it up off the top shelf in the shed where you placed it (but forgot yourself, but they remembered) and bring it to you. I absolutely assure you: My border collie knows at all times where the ball is. There’s zero question of object permanance.
      - lesuorac 2y ago
        I swear people who talk about object permanence have never tested it. The Wikipedia article about babies even talks about it not starting until month 8 [1]! At least, under "Contradicting evidence" they talk about other studies that showed as early as 3 months ... I think people just want to feel special and just can't accept that other animals have the same abilities that we do. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Stages
RajT88 2y ago
My dog growing up learned "W-A-L-K" after a while, and we switched to Pig Latin. Possibly by the time he could have learned it, he was pretty old. My current dog knows the basic ones like, "walk", "outside", "lunch", etc.
romanhn 2y ago
I can believe it with dogs, but my cat of almost 20 years has never indicated any understanding of or interest in human speech. She sometimes reacts to tone of voice, sometimes to specific noises (like treat baggie crumbling when opened), but not any particular words. Half the time she could care less about the tone or noises as well. That seems pretty in line with my general understanding of cat "psychology".
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Gary Larson expressed this best: https://www.marketingfirst.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/gary-larson-what-we-say-to-dogs-what-dogs-hear.jpg https://www.marketingfirst.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/...
- kxrm 2y ago
  Anecdotal but I have trained a cat to understand certain words. I doubt she ever was able to contextualize the language, but she would react to specific words related to treats. In addition to that she would react to her name. Not in the same way a dog would but she would look at you when you said her name. I think with dogs it definitely comes more easily. Training a cat takes a lot more persistence since they do not have the same social tools as dogs.
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andrewla 2y ago
Agreed; this is the default belief of anyone who has interacted with a dog. If someone were to advance the thesis that dogs were incapable of understanding words I would require some pretty strong evidence before I would believe them. The soundboard stuff in the article -- not so much. Training a dog to press a button is simple conditioning, but implying any sort of understanding of the language is a bit of a stretch. It sounds like the referenced research (I haven't read the paper) only tests the other way around (that dogs can understand some speech). If you can show me a dog trained to understand "stand on the yellow bench" and similar commands, but never actually hearing the specific command "sit on the red chair" and being able to execute that, then maybe I'm interested, but otherwise a dog hitting a button that says "I love you" is great for instagram but is indistinguishable from a button that says "look at me and pet me please".
- gmalette 2y ago
  Look into Bunny the sheepadoodle https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny?igsh=cHNtZTk0Y3dsNDY1 https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny?igsh=cHNtZTk0Y3dsND.... She makes consistent phrases like “look look outside squirrel” or “dad upstairs poop”.
govideo 2y ago
Reminds me of when I was in 3rd grade, I told my teacher that some birds (parrots) can really understand words. He flat out laughed at me in front of the whole class, and said No Way. I quietly disagreed with him. When I got home, I told the story to my bird :)
gspencley 2y ago
This speaks to an interesting question that is extremely difficult to answer: "Can pets think conceptually?" A word like "table", to a human, does not represent a concrete. It represents an abstraction, ALL tables, all things that have a flat surface and four legs. When a dog hears "table", or "walk", do they understand the abstract concept of walking, or tables in general? Or do they interpret it as a very specific, concrete verb or noun? That is the 6 million dollar question when it comes to an animal's ability to truly, genuinely understand spoken language. This is also why some philosophers conclude that animals cannot reason (it's a hypothesis, though, we don't know). Reason requires abstract thought and being able to prove that an animal is capable of abstract thinking is incredibly difficult.
- ajuc 2y ago
  What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. When I was with my dog in my parents' house and said "spacer" (walk in Polish) - he was happy and jumped around in anticipation, bringing the leash. He did the same in my grandparents house even though we weren't going to the same place - he just wanted to go on a walk doesn't matter the area. What's your explanation that does not involve abstracting the action from the concrete area and time? Another example - my sister trained our other dog to bring her plush toys on command. She hidden them in house and said "szukaj" (search) and then rewarded the dog with a clicker and/or a treat when the dog brought her the toy. It takes several steps (first you hide the toy very close and then you hide it outside of view). Also you reward the dog with the clicker on intermediate successes like getting the toy without bringing it to the owner. Anyway - one time my sister lost one glove when we were on a walk with that dog. She noticed only when we were returning from the fields. She gave the dog the other glove to sniff and said "szukaj". Ciri (our dog) went back a few hundred meters searching for the glove and found it and brought it back. There are smarter and dumber dogs (Ciri was probably the smartest dogs we ever had) - but the ability to generalize and reason is obviously there. Like - I can't imagine an unbiased scientist having a dog for extended period of time and not seeing it. Dogs also have theory of mind (I've seen Ciri bury a bone in one place, wait for our other dog - Jaskier - to go home, and rebury it elsewhere). Dogs also know which things are forbidden, and know that the things that are forbidden - aren't forbidden when nobody's there to see them do it :) We also had a pretty aggressive dog before that - Kuba - which used to pursue neighbors cat when it came to our backyard. The backyard was fenced, and when the cat could see our dog - he wouldn't come. So our dog pretended to be asleep or hidden and waited for the cat to come, then he pursued it up a tree and waited under the tree till we came to free the cat. This requires reasoning. It shouldn't be surprising - these are social animals that hunt in packs, cooperate, play pack politics, and need to reason about others in their pack and about the prey. How would they survive as a species if they had to invent pack tactics from scratch every time they hunted? Obviously they can generalize. I find most of these arguments against animals thinking either incredibly naive or biased. Like some people actually argue dogs are "meat automatons" with no capacity to think whatsoever. It's like fishers saying fish can't feel pain :/

dhosek 2y ago

The author Mary Robinette Kowal has a cat, Elsie, who uses a button board. I’m reluctant to call it language exactly, but it is definitely a kind of communication. An example is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C48uKZ8veql/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C48uKZ8veql/ It’s interesting how words shift in meaning with the cat, so litterbox, for example, has come to be a word for anything unpleasant. Elsie also will come up with nicknames for people she encounters relatively frequently, not always complimentary.

philipov 2y ago
> so litterbox, for example, has come to be a word for anything unpleasant. That's rich. It exactly mirrors how we have come to use gastronomical words such as "disgusting" for moral opprobrium. The same parts of the limbic system are used to process both concepts. Anything that's bad could be described as 'shitty' which is about as close as we can get to the same usage.
ChoHag 2y ago
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buildbot 2y ago

Echoing others, everyone knew this but we do need to actually test and prove it. My cat knows speak, sit, 360, shake, nose kiss, and up as far as tricks go. Originally, we paired both a hand motion and the word. Now, either works. I can make the sit gesture, she’ll sit. Or just saying sit works too. She’s observed how we open our doors and now is capable of leaping up and pulling the handle herself, including a little wiggle to pull the door open enough to wedge her face through for final entry. Cats seem to use tone in their meows to tell you a lot, and while I can’t say I understand really, it’s clear when there’s a hello chirp or an upset, lower tone yowl.

pizza 2y ago

There really are all the ingredients out there for the creation of an animal-human communication model. Except maybe money and will.

fragmede 2y ago
People spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on their pets. I'm sure a company will come along to try and make one because holy shit you'd make a lot of money selling the app that lets your pet talk to you.

erehweb 2y ago

See also the Canadian satirical news show that claimed that dogs in Montreal would have to be bilingual. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/no-dogs-don-t-have-to-be-bilingual-in-montreal-1.1191892 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/no-dogs-don-t-have-t...

codr7 2y ago

Hmm, I'm not that sure. I did a month of quiet Yoga (no talking whatsoever) and brought my dog with me for the ride. I came to realize that the words are mostly there to help me, she doesn't care. If I switch the word and say it with the same energy/body language, the result is the same. I don't even need words anymore, body language is more effective with my dog.

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bityard 2y ago
Dogs can absolutely learn sign language for basic commands. There are books about it. We had some success with ours. The main difficulty is you do have to use some kind of sound to get their attention if they're not looking at you. (Perhaps a clap would do.)
- codr7 2y ago
  I started snapping my fingers to get her attention.
rahimnathwani 2y ago
The researchers aimed to rule out variables such as a dog responding to their owner's cues — like, the owner putting on shoes to go outside — the identity of the human saying the word, or memorizing the location of buttons on the board.
- bitwize 2y ago
  John W. Pilley conducted investigations involving his border collie named Chaser. Chaser had ~200 or so toys, each with a unique name; if Pilley asked her to fetch a toy by name, she would reliably find the corresponding toy out of a pile of all of them and bring it back. Pilley found that when Chaser was asked to fetch a toy whose name Chaser hadn't heard, Chaser would find the new toy she hadn't seen before in the pile and bring it back. He controlled for cues like face and body language by sitting still with his back to Chaser while giving the commands, so that he could neither see the toy being fetched nor unconsciously signal to Chaser. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog)

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bityard 2y ago

Perhaps off-topic, but we had a dog that knew swearing when she heard it. Most dogs are well-attuned to both positive and negative emotions. In particular, when a human starts yelling and throwing things, they get the hell out of dodge. So it's obviously not a surprise that a dog would beat a hasty exit when their human emits a flurry of exasperated expletives. However, our dog took it a bit further. Before kids, my wife and I had a habit of swearing in our normal, neutral conversations. It took a while before I noticed the pattern but eventually I found that even a light and airy "well, fuck" essentially inaudibly under my breath would quite reliably cause our dog to sigh heavily, get up, and saunter out of the room with considerably more than a whiff of indignation.

throw745859 2y ago

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noman-land 2y ago
There are plenty of humans that display similar lack or control when flying into a rage.
- throw745859 2y ago
  And system knows how to deal with it. Try to walk around, attacking random people with a knife, cops would deal with you pretty fast! I have a stalker that tries to kill me every day! But I am not allowed to get restraining order against it! No! Somehow it is my responsibility not to trigger this smart noble creature! I must walk the right way (not too fast, not too slow). I am not allowed to carry items it does not like (food, babies, other animals). And it can defecate on my yard, but that is not trespassing! And any hospital bills are on my, of course! We do not tolerate drunk drivers, but dog owners without leash (about the same level of danger) are not punished!

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

Raises the age-old and now-new-again-thanks-to-LLMs of the nature of the difference between recognizing sounds and understanding words. I have zero doubt that our dog can do the former. Not sure about the latter.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

The article is clearly a stark example of selection bias, ignoring all the times where the dog didn't press relevant buttons and highlighting random successes. There are countless proofs that dogs don't understand words, and it's extremely easy to demonstrate: https://youtube.com/shorts/CIDZG7bdP7k https://youtube.com/shorts/CIDZG7bdP7k

dboreham 2y ago

It's just an LLM. My cat can understand a few words.

larrik 2y ago

On the one hand, people put a lot of meaning behind things that may not have it. On the other hand, I can tell one of my dogs which room my wife is in and he'll go directly to that room to get her. My house isn't small, either. I didn't specifically train him to do that, and it doesn't even come up that often, so I don't actually know why it works.

pjerem 2y ago
Yeah. Dogs. It’s incredible how they can be both incredibly stupid and incredibly smart altogether.

TheLockranore 2y ago

Do we have blind confirmation? As in, do the dogs carry out volleys with people that don't know them? Dogs could be picking up body language, pheromones, and other signals rather than comprehending; without, this could be the old vaudeville act of the counting horse that stops tapping when the owner reacts.

whereistimbo 2y ago

Can dog understand numbers like 1237124? Or email like whereistimbo@outlook.com?

denimboy 2y ago

I knew a dog that had a decent vocabulary. He would visibly react to words like CAR, WALK, or PARK. He also understood PARTY and MEAT and would wag his tail for PART and lick his chops to MEAT. One time we were going to a BBQ so I explained to him we were taking the CAR to a MEAT PARTY and he got super excites, wagging his tail and going to the door all while frothing at the mouth. Anecdotal but it certainly looked like he could synthesize concepts and imagine what was going to happen in the near future. I've done a few other experiments with my foreign speaking friends and it appeared to me that dogs understand the language their owners speak primarily.