If very small children invariably and perfectly learn the verbal communication of their parents, including clicks and what not, why don’t they also intuitively learn the language of their household pets, in other words, “talk to the animals”.
Most early human speech is simply learned by observing the relationship between reproducible sounds and the experiential events that are repeatedly associated with those sounds.
Animals don’t talk as humans do … they don’t possess human language.
Animals certainly communicate in their own manners, and humans can learn a lot about these communications. But that seems to be categorically a very different thing from acquiring speech.
I taught my children what the noises mean … growl = bite … purr = I’m going to eat you … bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark = someone at the door …
This reminds me of a reporter that didn’t speak cat.
Language skill development requires there be a language to learn, which animals don’t have, and it requires feedback. Fido isn’t performing any positive reinforcement if Johny gets his growl right.
Animals also aren’t consistently mimicking sounds for the child to reproduce. If you played repeating animal noises and offered reinforcement when a child replicated it, you could probably teach your child to growl or moo. CPS might be a wee bit concerned if your 5 y/o barks and moos as their primary communication.
Children learn the body language of animals very early on. I watched my own kids with the cats, dogs ands chickens. My snakes and turtles not so much.
The lil’wrekker used to whisper in her dogs ear when she was very young (3), we used to try to get her to tell us what she was saying. She never would tell. We thought it was adorable!
But ,she also learned all our pets body language, and knew instinctively when to back off.
And probably the most obvious reason–even supposing animals somehow did have language–is that animals and humans have significantly different physiological mechanisms for producing sounds. The “language instinct” of humans is probably very closely connected neurologically with the motor-physical development of the mechanisms humans use to generate language.
When my grandson visits, he might be well talking in the same language my dog uses, but his “speech” is muffled by his diaper.
Anyhow, with the many books kids read with talking animals, they probably think that talking in human language to them is something they understand.
What’s being overlooked is that many children grow up without pets in the house, or have pets that don’t make a distinctive sound, such as goldfish.
How much time do they spend socializing with pets and how much socializing with humans?
Also, remember the kid who spoke Klingon with his dad? The English he spoke with everyone else eventually swamped learning Klingon. Part of it was the Klingon was less complete and so couldn’t convey all the tings the kid wanted to say, at least not easily.
As was said, animal language is too simple in concepts compared to human needs. Remember too, children spend a long time experiencing human and animal behaviors without speaking. They learn small animals avoid rough handling, grabbing tails is NOT appropriate – even if convenient, and animals will follow anything that frequently drops food. This happens long before toddlers begin forming sounds that they can make into terms for concepts that children can understand. Sounds which aren’t very much like barking.
The neighbor’s toddler called cats “Yeowmi”. I thought that might have been Chinese slang for ‘kitty’. Its not – the little girl came up with that name for cat based on the sounds it makes. SHe didn’t use that sound as a medium of communication with cats.
I think the O.P.'s premise might be that newborns are completely unaware of the world’s rules and would mistake dogs and cats as mini-sapients with quadrupedal hairy bodies and the toddler should try to use them for the same benefits they get from humans. Maybe if we made a list of all these benefits they might see critically how, over the span of a few years, the kids get wise.
That was a love-pat compared to this.
What? No reference you to children who were raised by wolves or dogs? Totally true, too. It wouldn’t be on the internet if it wasn’t!!
There aren’t dog or cat words for the things small children want to learn.
I donno–my cats ate pretty good at saying “feed me now, dammit!”
Is this like meowing back or your cat or something? Because I thought everyone did that.
Forget about cats and dogs a moment-- Let’s think about humans. If I put you in a room with a random person from China, could you communicate? After all, you both speak Human, don’t you?
And the answer, of course, is that while you could communicate a little, it would be extremely limited, and would mostly be limited to general emotional state and maybe basic biological necessities. That’s all that you can say in Human, and for any language that you can say more in, you have to learn it.
And that’s for the species with the best communication abilities on the planet. So if anything, you’d expect what you can say in Dog or in Cat to be even more limited. And your dogs and cats can’t have any learned canine or feline language, because even if their brains were capable of it, where would they learn it from? The only languages they could possibly learn would be those of their housemates.
Which they do learn to some (very limited) degree. My first dog understood dozens of different synonyms for “walk”, and most of our dogs (having been raised with cats) have learned from the cats to “purr”, in some way or another, when they were content. And actually, that last one is instructive: No animal other than cats actually has the vocal apparatus to truly purr, and so any other animal doing so must be making only an approximation to the sound, and different dogs will come up with different approximations.
I’ve also heard of dogs who’ve managed to come up with a sound that vaguely approximates “I love you” (with an extremely heavy canine accent). Though I’m not sure if they know what that’s supposed to mean, or if they just know that the humans really like it when they make that sound.
Or that’s just a sound that dogs make and English speakers want to think it is in any way whatsoever meaningful.
Under the assumption that people speaking other languages would be expressing affection around their pets, too, I decided to do a quick search for that, putting dog says “I love you” into Google translate for a few languages, then doing Google video searches on the translation. In by brief search, I saw no instances of dogs saying “je t’aime” or “te amo” or “daisuke desu.” The search did turn up instances of foreign language descriptions of English language video clips–one of a husky on YouTube, one of a pug in a David Letterman Dumb Pet Tricks skit. In both cases, the human repeated “I love you” over and over in a high-pitched voice, triggering the dog to start gearing up to a howl. The “sputtering” start to the howl would have 2 or 4 or so distinct “syllables”, and the owners ignored the ones that didn’t have exactly 3 syllables and ignored the eventual howl.