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!

  • vxx@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 days ago

    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.

    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200851