Can dogs really talk to humans? Researchers tested these smart dogs
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If you’re on social media, you may have seen amazing videos of dogs pressing word buttons on soundboards, apparently to communicate with their owners.
When? Stella, “the world’s first talking dog,” And other dog Instagram stars asking to go to the park or the pool, or complaining about pain in their paws, certainly seem like they’re communicating using human language.
Can dogs talk?, a documentary from nature of thingsExplores what’s really going on behind your Chihuahua’s chatter.
Can dogs understand human language?Probably the video of these talking dogs caught everyone’s attention Federico RossanoAn associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches social interaction in humans and animals.
At first, Rosano dismissed the clip as simply staged. “How do we know that this is actually happening and there is no indication of it – that the owner didn’t just do the training and then record the clip so that, you know, you could show it?” He said.
However, he was curious, and soon decided to investigate what was going on. While previous animal-human communication studies were hampered by their small sample sizes, Rosano began gathering data on the word buttons used by dozens of dogs and cats, and has since grown that number to nearly 10,000 pets in nearly 50 countries. This is the largest study so far.
The first experiments conducted by Rosano and his team showed that dogs respond to words they hear by pressing buttons, even without their owners’ unconscious prompting.
Another study addressed the criticism that dogs may press buttons randomly. After analyzing a surprising number of button presses for almost two years, researchers found that this was not the case – some words were used more than others. Most popular? “Outside,” “play,” “food,” “treat,” “water,” “scratches,” “walk” and “should.”
“The words that are used most often are words that are meaningful to the dog,” Rosano said. “So some of these things, they don’t use a lot — other words that might not be what we expect, like ‘training’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘friend.'”
When her ‘Beach’ word button broke, Stella, “the world’s first talking dog,” found other words to say what she wanted. See Can Dogs Talk? On CBC Gem.
Association or communication?
With these preliminary studies done, Rosano and her colleague, Amalia Bastos of Johns Hopkins University, delved deeper into another question often raised by skeptics: Do dogs actually understand the words they use?
“An animal can learn that pressing the ‘sad’ button gets attention,” said zoologist Eric Kershenbaum of the University of Cambridge in the UK, “and once they’ve learned this, they can manipulate these different concepts in quite complex ways, without even realizing that there’s a semantic meaning behind it.”
Bastos conducted an experiment on a beagle cross named Parker that looked at how dogs understood the word “help.”
“Most of the buttons dogs have, like ‘food’ or ‘play’ or ‘walk,’ these are simple associations that relate to a particular context,” she said. “‘Help’ is interesting because it’s a little more general than many simple buttons.”
In the experiment, Parker faced a problem he could not solve on his own – retrieving a gift from a sealed container. The aim was to see whether, in this unfamiliar setting, he would use the ‘help’ button to get his owner’s attention.
In one experiment, Parker faced a problem he could not solve on his own – extracting a tasty cheese from a sealed container. So, he started using his ‘help’ word button to get his owner’s attention. See Can Dogs Talk? On CBC Gem.
Rosano is particularly excited about studying dogs who appear to engage in what is known in linguistics as productivity – the ability to use a limited number of words to express an infinite number of ideas.
At the time of filming, Rosano’s study was tracking 790 dogs that used multiple buttons simultaneously. For example, Stella has 48 buttons on her soundboard and she manipulates them regularly.
“That’s why I’m doing (the research), even though people told me I could lose my job,” Rosano said. “I’ve seen animals put two or three buttons together in a way that looks like they’re making sentences. But of course, you shouldn’t stop there because that thing could be trained.
“We are at the beginning of what we are doing, and we need to be prepared to collect data for years.”
Watch Can dogs talk? More on CBC Gem The Nature of Things YouTube Channel.
Roberto Verdecchia is an award-winning TV documentary director, writer and producer and lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has a dog who can probably chew word buttons if he gets a chance.
