Op coming back to say, wow. I didn’t expect this thread go in this direction, but I like it!
Continue.
I worked in an office where the Boss had two Yorkies. I would occasionally take them outside. I would always ask “Go ouride?” and they would get all excited and run to the door.
As An experiment, one day I said “You bastards” in the same tone of voice. Sure enough, they ran to the door.
Quoth Blake:
Why would an observation that’s already well-known to anyone who’s ever owned a dog be publishable? I might as well submit a paper to the Astrophysical Journal with my stunning revelation that, relative to the Earth’s reference frame, the Sun rises in the east, once per day. And it’s not just in contexts like “While I was out with Rover”, either: With my old dog Bear, if you mentioned bears (as in ursines) in conversation with some other human, without even thinking of the dog, he’d still perk up and walk over.
Well, I saw a show on PBS (probably Nova, but I’m not 100% certain) that involved animals and language. They showed off a dog and his owner that had a huge pile of stuffed animals (over 100), each with a name written on in marker. The owner claimed that the dog knew the name of each of these toys. He could tell the dog, “Get ______” and the dog would run over and get the toy named ________.
So, the show’s presenter did a test. He took a random handful of toys. He put four of them behind a couch and told the dog to get ______. The dog came back with toy named ______. This was repeated a few times. Then, the presenter tried another trick. He had a new toy, a plush Darwin. He put the toy Darwin with the other handful of toys and told the dog to get Darwin. The dog left, looked at the toys, and was obviously confused. The presenter had to ask to get Darwin more than once, but eventually the dog did come back with the correct toy, apparently having ruled out the other possibilities and having decided that the new toy must be the one named Darwin. That seemed pretty impressive.
But then the show also showed off Alex the parrot, without showing any of the flaws mentioned above, so take that with a grain of salt.
My own anecdote. Our dogs never responded to their names unless they were said in a particular tone of voice.
To a dog, does their name mean “I am the entity with that name” or just “hey!”? I’ve never seen anything that makes me think the former.
There is a big difference between communication and use of language. Many animals use the former, including insects, but language requires grammer. Words and rules can be combined to convey new concepts. Blake’s example above shows the difference. You can train a dog to sit, and you can train a dog to jump on a table. But you can’t then expect them to respond to the command “sit on the table”, they can’t process that instruction.
When I’m over at my friends’ place with my dog and theirs, the dogs recognize their names when we issue them commands. If I say “Rocky, sit!”, Rocky sits while Sadie and Elsa do whatever it is they’re doing.
Our dogs have always responded to their names; they also respond to anything else said in the same tone of voice. “C’mere, you mangy idiot; are you a stupid ugly dog? Oh, yes you are,” in a loving tone of voice as if we used the critter’s actual name resulted in the exact same behavior. OTOH, we had a cat who loved tuna. My husband could say in a normal conversational tone, “Hon, would you mind making me a tunafish sandwich?” and the cat would be in the kitchen before I was. Our current dog absolutely knows the words “bacon” and “bread.” We have to spell them if we don’t want him to get upset. Or use other words, as in “we are out of that sliced pork product,” or “can you pick up a loaf of carbohydrates while you’re out?”
Mine too.
I tested this with my dog and cats.
I’d look at them and call out random names or use random words. I’d vary tonality and such to see if how it was said rather than what was said made the difference.
The dog would look at me with a sort of “Are you talking to me?” look but not very interested and the cats would totally ignore me. If I used their names the dog would take distinctly more notice and the cats would look at me (depending on the name called) and then ignore me.
Without a doubt their names got their attention in ways no other words did.
Since there’s not very many people agreeing with Blake, I’ll raise my hand, though I have very little to add to what he has already said. And he might not agree with what I’m about to say.
I always understood the way other animals responded to human sounds as being more reactionary than comprehending. When a dog hears his name said out loud, he does associate that sound with a concept, either ‘pay attention’ or ‘come here’. But the dog does not understand the name in the complex way that we do. He does not understand that this sign is part of his identity.
This is anecdotal, but I’ve tried this very many different dogs. Instead of using the name of the dog, I will often try using a different word, with the exact same tone/inflection that the owner uses and without fail the dog will respond.
If dogs really do understand the concept of names, they must think whistles are their names too.
Come to think of it, even if tone of voice is the most important part of the “name”, what’s the big deal? There are human languages which convey a significant amount of information in tone, too. Would you say that the Chinese don’t really understand language; they’re just reacting to tone of voice?
I certainly agree with what he’s been saying but I have nothing to add so I haven’t felt the need to comment. I like that GQ doesn’t allow polls. 
I think Blake’s most salient example of what he is getting at was the mixing of commands he mentioned upthread, specifically:
[QUOTE=Blake]
In stark contrast, you can easily teach a dog to “jump on the table” and to “sit”. But you try to get that same dog and get it to “sit on the table”. It can’t be done. You need to teach the dog what to do in response to that exact phrasing right form scratch. And you will need to do the same thing with “lie on the table” “Roll over on the table” and so forth. One by one. No matter how many tricks the dog already know or how many “on the table” tricks it knows, the next “trick on the table” has to be taught form scratch. This is why it take so long to train a dog, whereas a human infant could be obey all of these commands within minutes of learning the words.
Dogs clearly don’t recognise any of the words, they only recognise the sounds. There is no evidence that the response to their name is any different to the response to any other word that they have been conditioned to respond to.
[/QUOTE]
This really drove the point home (to me) that dogs (cats, parrots, what have you) really don’t have a grasp of language, only the ability to link sounds (or other stimuli) to an action or outcome.
Another useless anecdote: When I am going to take my dog out, I normally say “You want to go OUTSIDE?!?” to which she will normally respond with frantic tail-wagging and bounding for the door. However, I also will often throw in a different sentence (“Du Pont will get DOWNSIZED?!?”) with the same tone and inflection, and I will get the same response.
I think Blake is exaggerating how difficult it is to pick out individual words. In human speech, many words do run together (what we perceive as a series of discrete words really isn’t, if you look at a recorded waveform), but not all words. It’s not that surprising that some dogs will pick their names out of speech.
I would guess that some dogs will do a lot better at this than others. Some names will be easier to pick out. Some owners will use a range of intonations when calling their dog, training it to recognise a variety. None of this suggests dogs have any concept of language. Dogs are often trained to respond to a clicker in the same way as their name, that doesn’t mean they think “I am click”.
Does anyone here believe that dogs have the same concept of a name that we do? If so, what is your reasoning please?
There are some reports of captive primates being taught basic sign language, but these are disputed.
My cat, Cookie, also responds to “Mookie”, “Ookie”, “Dookie”, “Fookie” etc.
However, I notice that I always tend to use it in a certain tone when I call her name. The notes D and B.
So just now I got my guitar and played D-B in the same pitch and rhythm that I call “Cookie”. No reaction. I tried a harmonica. No reaction. I whistled it. No reaction.
I tried saying “oo-ee” in the same tone. No reaction. Then “oo-mee”, “oo-bee”, “oo-lee”. No reaction. I tried “oo-kee” on the same notes - ears went up. Then “oo-tee” - ears went up.
Next, I tried speaking to her with her name in a sentence but no tonal emphasis. “I like eating cookies”: no reaction. “I like cookies when they have chocolate chips in them”: no reaction.
Then her name on its own, but without the tones - in a conversational style: “cookie”. Ears went up.
So in this experiment (is this classed as an ‘anecdote’ or a ‘case study’? I guess that changes depending on whether Blake agrees with it or not…) she seems to react to the tone provided there’s one plosive consonant, or the syllabic sounds in isolation, but not in any other context.
Also she just now stole a sausage from the stove, and she clearly understood “Cookie you fucking little shit!”
I’m not sure that is relevant. Perhaps your dog simply has stock in DuPont and is worried about his 401k.
My cats respond to tone of voice only. If one attempts to do something bad, it doesn’t matter what I say, just how I say it. I get their names wrong all the time, they look very much alike. Occasionally when one gets “lost” (locked in a closet or room unintentionally) I run around the house searching for them calling their name and they meow in return to be let out of their tortuous confinement. I can ask the dog to try and find the cat, but she just gets a puzzled look on her face half the time. The other half of the time she will lead me to where the cat is.
The dog responds very well to tone and can recognize a few words or phrases, but she has always been a very obedient dog and has picked up training very well. She reacts to anything that rhymes with her name with perked ears. Her reaction is greater if you are looking at her and say a word that rhymes with her name.
If I tell her to, “Go get Daddy” or “Wake up Daddy” she does those things. She associates the word “Daddy” with my husband because we trained her to do it. We have unconsciously trained other associations with words as well. R-I-D-E, W-A-L-K and P-A-R-K are words that cannot be spoken unless you want a dog nose in your ass pushing you out the door.
I do not think she can discern human language. I do think that she and I communicate very well without human language. I can give her a look and wag my finger at her and she will stop what she is doing. I can nod my head and she knows this is giving her permission to do something.
Try this experiment: present a behavioural scientist with an example of an animal showing intelligence or emotion, and its response will contain the 5-syllable word “anthropomorphise”. This may seem like intelligent use of language, but in fact it is pure conditioning. Over many years of training, the scientist has learned that the use of this utterance will earn the respect of its peers.
Me too.
Hold on, I need to get some more popcorn …
I saw a documentary recently talking about dogs and how they are so well attuned to the human face and eyes. The fact that they are is the whole reason that they are allowed to be “man’s best friend” in the first place.
Anywhich, the degree to which people will anthropomorphize their pets is amusing. Please continue.
Blake’s efforts aside there is evidence to suggest dogs understand language beyond merely being conditioned to a behavior when they hear a particular sound.
Personal experience and the above suggest to me a dog does know its name and identifies it as “me” when the name is used.
Dogs certainly display more complex thinking and problem solving capabilities than a mere automaton that has been programmed to do what it is told.
Dogs are fairly intelligent. Not genius and you won’t be having a debate with them but they are not brain dead either.
Thanks Blake. The experiments will be carried out this weekend. Should subsequent (reported) results provide indisputable evidence of nothing more than the Clever Hans effect, I’ll secretly continue to think she’s the smartest dog in the world, while (even more secretly) cursing the Dope.
Thanks for the sand-and-sandals coffee spit, Alka Seltzer. “I am click!”…“I am click!”