2mo ago

Is there really a difference between my understanding the phrase "go for a walk" and my dog understanding the phrase "go for a walk"?

I've had a few people tell me that although the dog and the person are both imagining the same thing - going for a walk, and all that that entails - the dog is merely associating the sound of the phrase with the activity.

But... isn't that... what language is? What's qualitatively different between the human and the dog here? The human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it's all just "sound = thing", no? 🤔

I don't speak Spanish, but I know that when I hear someone say something that sounds like "andallay!", it means "hurry up". I don't know what the word literally means, or how to actually spell it (well, I do now that I looked it up: ándale), or its etymology or whether or not it's a loan word from Chinese, but I know from experience (and cartoons) that it means "go faster". Am I a dog to a Mexican in this scenario? My understanding is as perfunctory as my dog's understanding of "go for a walk" is. But we wouldn't say that I'm not using language when I react appropriately to the "ándale!" instruction.

What am I not getting?

Cheers!

19 comments

That is exactly what language is. Someone makes a sound and you know what it means. Animals can't reason the fine details of what the meaning of words or context mean. The understand if A happens it means (action), and they do respond to the tone of your voice. Say the same thing in a different tone and it becomes confusing. An example is, if I angrily yell words in French at you (which you don't speak), even though those words mean "happy, joy, sunshine", you think I'm angry. But if I cuss at you in French in a super sweet voice, you think I'm being romantic. Humans, can speak non-native languages and not know how to read or write them.
- I had this realization some days ago and am nearly ashamed to say that because it took me some decades to think of it.
  My dogs know very well what cheese means.

My dogs understand the phrase "let's go" and can understand it as a combined phrase such as "let's go for a walk", "let's go outside", "let's go upstairs". People very much underestimate dogs' ability to truly understand human language.
I even had a very experienced and highly regarded dog trainer recently tell me that commands should ideally be single-syllable. Maybe, but certainly not due to any limitation in the dog's ability to understand longer words and phrases. I can even be cuddling with the dogs on the couch, say, "I need to pee", and they go running off to the bathroom (have to protect me, I guess).
- I thought all dogs were smarter than people thought because my first one (Yorkie) was practically a little kid in how he could understand me. I could tell him to go somewhere and he'd do it. He let me know if he needed to pee outside or if he was hungry. Always surprised me how much a dog could understand!
  Then I got a new one recently (Goldendoodle) and this little guy is a complete dumbass.
  I suspect it may come down to experience though. Yorkie was already about 4 when we got him and only took about a year for me and him to really understand each other. The Doodle we got when he was only a little over a month old and we've had him close to a year but it has been a pain to train. Could also just be down to personality, because he has done some pretty intelligent things that surprised us.
  
  Some personality for sure, also a year old is still quite young for a dog, he's probably still battling those dogly instincts.
  
  A huge part of it is talking with your dogs, training your dogs, and being consistent.
  
  The more you talk to your dog, being careful to use consistent language, the more it will understand. And the more it will focus on you, which is good for behavior in general.

human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it's all just "sound = thing", no? 🤔
The understanding of this complex and expressive structure is significant because it allows you to convey novel or abstract information. You will not be able to explain what a walk is to a dog without a demonstration, while you will be able to do so (to some degree) to the unfortunate hypothetical person who have never taken one before.

I think it's more you as a person understand that the sentence is that, a sentence. You understand how the sentence is made, why it means what it means, not just what it means.
The dog only understands the what.
Doesn't mean you still can't help teach dogs to communicate. Even saw a segment recently on PBS about dogs learning to use buttons that produce words and using them to make short sentences to communicate with their owners.

I think what you’re not getting is that dogs are neurologically wired different from humans, and so experience the world differently.
So a dog’s sense of self is different from a human’s, its sensory inputs are different, and its language processing is different.
It’s kind of like those AI models a decade or so back that were really good at identifying where a picture was taken — and then it turned out they’d mapped the relationship between the geolocation numbers in the EXIF data and weren’t looking at the image data at all.

Well, yeah, there's a difference "under the hood", as in how the brain is processing things.
But, on any practical level, dogs learn parts of human language.
What's really interesting is when you discover that dogs can tell the difference between "let's go to" specifics. If you're getting them to go for a walk, they start engaging in pre-walk behaviors. If you're getting them to go to the car, they'll engage in pre-car behaviors. Most dogs I've interacted with at that level, they can understand a ton of subordinate words like that.
I used the above examples because my corgi had both of those combinations down (though I didn't use let's go), plus a few others. I'd tell her "time for a walk", and she'd go get the leash, bring it to me, and wait for it to be put on.
I'd tell her, "time for a ride", and she'd go get her seat belt harness, then wait for it to be put on, just with less enthusiasm lol. Rides weren't always to places she wanted to go
But the cool thing is that I didn't intentionally teach her any of that. I'd get the leash while telling her it was walk time, call her to me and have her sit while I knelt down. She drew the connections and started getting the leash before I could. The harness part came later, and I did teach her the word for that item, then to go get it, which led to her figuring out the rest.
Dog vocabulary is limited. I can't recall the numbers, but there are only so many words they can keep and reliably remember. Their grammar if human language is also limited in that they don't "understand" that "let's go" has a specific function as in that it's saying "let us verb". The "let's go" is a word to them; you could say shit weird, like "walks gonna get" that makes no real sense in English, but they'd still learn what you meant by it and start getting ready to go for a walk.
It comes down to complexity, tbh. You, as a human, could learn more than a handful of words in Spanish, and eventually speak in whole sentences with clear grammar. A dog can't. There's a limit to how much they learn a language vs learning that some human grunts mean something.
See, dogs have language in the absence of humans. You see feral dog packs, and they're communicating constantly. Tails, ears, body, scent, all of it combined with vocalizations form a language of its own. It just isn't as complicated as human language. Even the most complicated animal languages that have been studied don't come close to human. But language isn't solely our gift.
So the dogs are indeed like you with your grasp of Spanish currently. They understand a pidgin form of human, and we learn pidgin dog. Mind you, most of the time they're better at human than we are at dog. Learning to understand tail movement, as an example, takes more time and exposure than people think. Did you know that the direction of wagging matters? It's a thing!

I asked my neighbor's dog. He said, "Woof".

Dogs are way more smarter than we give them credit for. They are the only animal that has been able to establish a relationship with humans to such a close degree, having evolved alongside us for tens of thousands of years.
I don't look at my dog Rocket as my pet, but rather as my best friend whom I rely on daily.
A while ago I didn't want him to get overly excited when I said the word "walk", so I started spelling it out instead. Didn't take him long to figure out it was the same thing.
It's not just a monologue either. He responds in ways that have subtle differences depending on how you say something and the intonation of what is said.
No other animal has even come close to creating such a close co-existence with humans. I'd go so far as to say they are better than most humans. People can be wankers, but a good dog will always have your back if treated with kindness and respect.
- No other animal has even come close to creating such a close co-existence with humans.
  Horses are at least close
  
  Yeah, I can see that, but with a horse it's more about training I would imagine. A punishment/reward system. With a dog it's more buddy like. I've never really had to chastise my dog, other than perhaps a little shock value smack when he was a pup. As for rewards, it doesn't even have to be a treat (although it helps). Sometimes his reward appears to be just seeing me smile or laugh, which brings me on to sense of humour. My dog certainly has a sense of humour and knows what's funny.
  All that aside, I wouldn't want a horse jumping up and sitting on my knee.

I found a study that suggests you're corect and dogs can differentiate between words and syllabis and can progress them similar to us, much worse though.
This study provides the first electrophysiological evidence, to our knowledge, for word processing in dogs, revealing its temporal dynamics. Dogs' ERP responses did not differentiate instruction words (WORDS) and phonetically similar nonsense words (SIMILAR), but ERP for both WORDS and SIMILAR was different from ERP for phonetically dissimilar nonsense words (NONSENSE). This suggests that dogs process instruction words differently from dissimilar nonsense words.
Dogs listened to commands (sit and come) and their modified versions in which phonemes were changed. Dogs noted the difference in alternation of both the first consonants (e.g. [tʃɪt] instead of sit) and the vowels (e.g. [sæt] instead of sit), as shown by the decline of responses to the alternated commands. Based on research on human infants, we have also no reason to assume that the vowel manipulation we applied here (swapping [i], [ɒ] and [ɛ] across conditions in the first vowel position) would be perceptually less salient than the consonant manipulation applied by Mills et al.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200851

I think you're right. The only discrepancy I can think of might be that you implicitly know that "andalley" has meaning and context beyond what you currently understand and ascribe to it. A dog probably doesn't think too hard about whether walking is the action of moving one's legs or the state of being outside.

If the sentence is garbled/muffled, which I will poorly attempt to represent in text by
l__'s g_ for _ wa__
a human is likely to still understand it. A dog would not (I assume, I am no dog researcher). So, a human's understanding of the "correct" ungarbled sounds is not the same as a dogs, otherswise the dog would understand the garbled sounds.

Nope, you've got the hang of it.

19 comments