Can Dogs Talk
In 2018, a speech therapist called Christina Hunger got a puppy called Stella. She soon noticed similarities between some of Stella’s behaviours and the non-verbal children that she worked with. These children would use ipads to communicate, and Christina wondered how Stella would respond with something similar: a set of buttons that each said a different word. Within a year, Stella was using around 20 buttons. Taking to social media to share Stella’s progress, Christina amassed a huge internet following and soon there were hordes of hopeful owners bringing buttons home to put their dogs to the test.
Could they really learn to use our language?
But do the dogs know what they’re saying? Is their word button use just random? Could they really learn to use our language? Federico Rossano, who runs the Comparative Cognition Lab at UCSD, has initiated the largest human-animal communication study ever undertaken, to try to answer the question Can Dogs Talk? As he says, “Can we find a way to get a window into animal minds that we did not necessarily have before?”
But Dr Rossano and his colleague Amalia Bastos are faced with a huge challenge, trying to work out whether the dogs really understand anything about words and language, or whether they’ve just been conditioned through associative learning. As Amalia says: “Associative learning is common to pretty much all animals, and it doesn’t require any sort of complex cognition. You could easily teach a mouse to press buttons.”
So could dogs learn to talk? It may seem a crazy question to ask, given that attempts to teach gorillas, chimps, and bonobos to use our language have been underwhelming at best, condemned at worst. But dogs have lived with humans for over 20,000 years. They’ve evolved through our relationships with them – and that evolutionary journey has enhanced their capacity to understand and communicate with us. So perhaps they could have evolved the ability to use our language in ways that other animals can’t?
Moving beyond associative learning
Certainly some dogs have shown a remarkable ability to learn words. Claudia Fugazza is studying some of the smartest dogs in the world as part of her Genius Dogs Challenge. Gaia, a border collie who knows the names of over 200 toys, is able to categorise new toys according to how she plays with them: are they ‘fetch’ toys, or ‘tug’ toys? As Dr Fugazza says, “Gaia could not have associated the name fetch or tug to the specific item because she has never heard that name while seeing that toy or while playing with that toy”. In other words, Gaia has moved beyond associative learning.
And Gaia isn’t the only one. By conducting an ‘Impossible Task’ experiment – a classic paradigm in animal cognition studies, used to see whether animals are inclined to and able to seek help from humans – Amalia Bastos was able to determine that some dogs are able to use word buttons in novel scenarios. Parker, a beagle mix, used her word buttons to say ‘help, look’ when she couldn’t get into a tupperware to receive a treat. By using the words in ways that she had never been conditioned to use them, she also seems to be moving beyond associative learning.
Conjuring a mental representation of a word when using it
At Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, a world capital for canine research, Marianna Boros has also found that dogs may understand words in similar ways to humans. For a long time it was assumed only humans could ‘referentially’ understand a word – conjuring a mental representation of a word when using it. But Dr Boros discovered that dogs may have to join us in this unique club. Testing dogs with EEG kits, and analysing their brain patterns when they’re told to expect one toy but then see another, her team found compelling evidence dogs may understand words the same way we do – it’s the first time any species outside our own has been shown capable of this.
To narrate and not just demand
Meanwhile, social media clips of dogs saying astonishing things continue to pour in. Dr Rossano has so far proved button use is intentional and non-random. His interest now lies in finding out what ways dogs might be using buttons similarly to how we use our language: for instance to narrate and not just demand; to demonstrate displacement (referring to things that aren’t present, or events that aren’t happening in the present); or productivity (the ability to combine words in new ways, often to describe new things).
While there are tantalising anecdotal clips of dogs using buttons in these ways, there’s still work to do analysing the data – but it’s getting us closer and closer to really understanding what is going on inside the mind of our canine companions.