Group items tagged

Sociolinguist Gavin Lamb examines how people use language to build social relationships with non-human beings, like dogs. He cites the research of Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-cognition scientist who studied verbal human-dog interaction. Some interesting findings: 1. Humans use dog-directed parentese for attention-getting, positive-affect, using a higher pitch, like we might for babies/toddlers. 2. Talking to dogs serves as a social lubricant for starting up conversations, or diffusing tense situations with other humans. 3. Asking rhetorical, unanswerable questions, e.g. "What's up, buddy?": an example of phatic communication, which is not information-driven, but which helps establish or maintain social relationships. The language serves a socio-pragmatic, rather than denotative function.

This article explores how dogs perceive human language and whether tone of voice matters. Through this experiment, it was discovered that dogs respond positively to a positive tone of voice and neutrally to a neutral tone of voice. However, if the dog was reprimanded in a positive tone of voice, the dog would perceive that as a praise. In terms of language evolution, it suggests that the ability to "process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human."

Language of Dogs

Dogs mull over human speech much the way we do, and they try hard to decipher what we're saying to them, a new study suggests. The research, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that our dogs are riveted to our words.

This article explains how dogs can interpret our speech. Not only are they able to understand the words we say but also how we say them. They can learn words on their own and even better when we use an appropriate tone. This means when we "vent" to our dogs, they might actually understand what we are saying.

Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

Like a human's brain, a dog's brain responds to the meaning of a word and how the word is said. And like with a human's brain, the dog's left hemisphere reacts to meaning and the right hemisphere reacts to intonation. In the study, words were said to dogs in positive and neutral tones, but only positive words spoken in a positive tone prompted strong activity in the brain's reward center. This study suggested that non-primates could process meaning and emotion long before humans could talk.

ABC News story about Chaser, the dog who knows 1,000 words.

Humans can communicate what is going on with them, and dogs can, too. The difference is, while humans primarily use verbal communication, dogs mainly communicate non-verbally through the use of body language and secondarily through vocalizations. This body language includes tail carriage and motion, ear and eye position, body position and movement, and facial expressions.

A 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.

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

ATLANTA - Sky is playing and playing. His mom tells him to take a break and drink some water. He does. A little while later, after they play some more, his mom tells him to go lay down. He does. Sky is a Border Collie. His mom is Doctor Melody Jackson.

Melody Jackson, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, has been outfitting service dogs with computerized vests, so that in an emergency they can find another human and pull a mechanical lever on the vest that triggers an audio message: My handler needs you to come with me!

Words in the English language are structured to help children learn, according to research. Words like "woof" accurately represent the sound of a dog while sounds with similar meanings may have a similar structure, such as the "sl" sound at the beginning of a word often has negative properties as in "slime, slur, slum, slug."

Words in the English language are structured to help children learn, according to research. Words like "woof" accurately represent the sound of a dog while sounds with similar meanings may have a similar structure, such as the "sl" sound at the beginning of a word often has negative properties as in "slime, slur, slum, slug."

Two stories: First, about the Diana monkey (alarm calls), with some new insight. Second, about prairie dog chirps, which have "a grammar of color, shapes, and sizes."

The grass roots are at war with astroturf . Yellow Dog Democrats become boll weevils and then Blue Dogs. Beltway bandits troll Pennsylvania Avenue in search of earmarks and extenders . Say what? Every subculture has its lingo, but few add secret code faster than the American political class.

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

An article that discusses how much dogs are able to understand human language, and why their understanding is limited.

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.