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If you’re on social media, you might’ve seen the amazing videos of dogs pressing word buttons on a soundboard, evidently to communicate with their owners.
When Stella, “the world’s first talking dog,” and other canine Instagram stars appear to be asking to go to the park or the pool, or complaining of a pain in their paw, it certainly looks as if they’re having a conversation using human language.
Can Dogs Talk?, a documentary from The Nature of Things, digs into what’s really going on behind your chihuahua’s chatter.
Can dogs grasp human language?The videos of these presumably talking dogs grabbed the attention of Federico Rossano, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego who researches social interaction in humans and animals.
At first, Rossano dismissed the clips as easily staged. “How can we know that this is actually happening and there’s no cueing — that the owner has not just trained and then recorded the clip so that, you know, you can show it?” he said.
He was intrigued, however, and soon decided to investigate what was going on. While previous animal-human communication studies had been constrained by their smaller sample sizes, Rossano began gathering data on the word buttons used by dozens of dogs and cats, and the number has since grown to roughly 10,000 pets in almost 50 countries. It’s the largest such study to date.
The first experiments Rossano and his team conducted showed that dogs do respond to the words they hear when buttons are pressed, even without unintentional cues from their owners.
Another study addressed the criticism that the dogs could just be pressing buttons at random. After almost two years of analyzing a staggering number of button presses, researchers found it wasn’t the case — some terms were used more than others. The most popular? “Outside,” “play,” “food,” “treat,” “water,” “scritches,” “walk” and “want.”
“The words that are used the most are words that make sense for a dog,” Rossano said. “So some of these things, they don’t use a lot — other words that might not be quite in line with what we expect, like ‘training’ or ‘mad’ or ‘friend.’”
When her ‘beach’ word button was broken, Stella, “the world’s first talking dog,” found other words to describe what she wanted. Watch Can Dogs Talk? on CBC Gem.
Association or communication?
With these preliminary studies done, Rossano and his colleague, Amalia Bastos of Johns Hopkins University, went deeper on another question often raised by skeptics: Do dogs truly understand the words they use?
“An animal could learn that pressing the ‘sad’ button gets attention,” said Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “And once they’ve learned that, they can manipulate these different concepts in quite complex ways without understanding there’s a semantic meaning behind it.”
An experiment Bastos ran on a beagle cross named Parker looked at how dogs understand the word “help.”
“With most of the buttons that dogs have, like ‘food’ or ‘play’ or ‘walk,’ these are simple associations that are related to one particular context,” she said. “‘Help’ is interesting because it’s a little bit more general than a lot of the simpler buttons.”
In the experiment, Parker faced a problem he couldn’t solve on his own — getting a treat out of a sealed container. The aim was to see whether, in this unfamiliar setting, he would use the ‘help’ button to get the attention of his owner.
In an experiment, Parker faced a problem he couldn’t solve on his own — getting a treat out of a sealed container. So, he ended up using his ‘help’ word button to get his owner’s attention. Watch Can Dogs Talk? on CBC Gem.
Rossano is especially excited about studying dogs that appear to be engaging in what’s 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, Rossano’s study was tracking 790 dogs that use multiple buttons together. Stella, for example, has 48 buttons on her soundboard and combines them regularly.
“This is the reason I’m doing [the research] even though people told me I might lose my job,” Rossano said. “I’ve seen animals putting together two or three buttons in ways that look like they were producing sentences. But of course, you should not stop there because that thing could have been trained.
“We’re very much at the beginning of what we’re doing, and we need to be ready to collect data for years and years.”
Watch Can Dogs Talk? on CBC Gem and The Nature of Things YouTube channel.
Roberto Verdecchia is an award-winning TV documentary director, writer and producer, and a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has a dog that would probably chew on word buttons if given the chance.
