What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist About Language | WIRED - 0 views
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anonymous on 28 Aug 17A linguist who began to train her border collie for sheepdog competitions using a dog whistle realized that the commands reminded her of language. The article goes on to detail communication between dogs and people, and how dog's cognition and understanding goes past following basic commands. For example, Chaser, the border collie, was able to fast map and learn things through reference cues - which goes much farther past simply understanding commands. It turns out, shepherds use only a few whistle commands with their sheepdogs, but the whistles change meaning based on situation, pitch, speed, etc, and provide information to the dog, similar to prosody, a key part of human language.