I was joking the other day that I thought my standard poodle had finally had his water moment, as when Helen Keller realized for the first time that words meant things and signed “water” back to Annie Sullivan.
When I got Dashiell, I think he’d been mostly an outside dog. He didn’t pay much attention when people spoke around him. He paid attention to things I did, such as getting my camera (my dogs all react when I get my camera out because I usually use it outside and bring them along.) He watched people. He just didn’t listen.
Now he seems to listen for words that interest him, such as walk and park and feed. He certainly reacts to words now in a way he did not when I got him. And he watches my face when I speak to him, which he did not do when I first got him.
He’s also put together the receive command-execute command-receive reward sequence, which my Eskie Rai never managed to do. She knew some words that she would interpret as commands (sit and stay were two of them) but would only execute them when I sounded genuinely scared, not for a treat or other reward.
But, words… I really wonder what Dashiell makes of them. There’s that old Far Side cartoon about what dogs hear when we speak, which is blah blah blah (their name) blah blah blah. That’s probably true, except it would be more like, “Blah blah Dashiell, out, blah blah, Spenser, Archie, blah blah door, come, blah.” My question is, what does he think of the blahs? Do they sound like individual words to him, or like a long mushy string of sounds punctuated by words he knows? And does he understand that these are words, just words he doesn’t know… or does he completely disregard what he doesn’t know, not even thinking about it, and pay attention only to what he does know?
My papillon, Archie, who is much smarter than my poodle (statistically unlikely, I know, but true for these individual dogs), seems to get the concept of words. He listens, looking puzzled, when people say things he doesn’t know. Papillons are known for trying to imitate human sounds and even learning to say, for example, “eh-row” as a greeting, so I think it’s possible Archie does understand that what I say is all words–just words he knows and words he doesn’t. Spenser might understand this, too, since he is a bright boy who pays attention. I’m not calling my poodle dumb, exactly, just dumb for a poodle and not as smart as my other two dogs.
I don’t know for certain, though, what any dogs get from my speech.
Spenser knows his toys have different names, but does he know that nubby ball and spangly ball are both balls? Or does he hear nubbyball and spanglyball as individual, unrelated words?
He understand categories. When he was a puppy, he saw the DPCS and I eating popcorn and wanted some, so he begged… and got nothing. So he brought us his food dish. We still gave him nothing. So he went to the kitchen and got a people bowl and brought that to us, obviously thinking, okay, people food, people bowl. We still said no, so he went back to the kitchen and brought a different bowl. He tried that a few times, each time with a bowl. Never a plate or cup or fork, even though people eat with all those things and food could be put on or in them. So I believe he has a category in his head for “bowl.”
He also sulks when we take a dryer ball away from him… as if we’re taking something away unfairly, counter to the household rules. He really doesn’t tend to take things that aren’t toys, in general, yet he always goes after the dryer balls. I believe that, in his head, balls are a category and balls are toys.
Does that mean he can, and that he does, apply a word to a category? Round, bouncy things are balls, and nubby and spangly are the names of those balls? Dogs are dogs and Archie and Dashiell are the names of the dogs he lives with?
Certainly smart dogs can learn hundreds of words. Rico and Betsy, in particular, have shown that.
Rico’s behaviour suggested that he knew words were words in the sense that, if you presented him with an object he knew the name of (say, a ball) and an object he didn’t know the name of and then told him to get (strange word he did not know), he would get the new object, on the grounds that (strange word he did not know) was not “ball”, so he couldn’t have been instructed to get the ball.
But did Rico know that our speech was entirely, or at least mostly, made up of words? I’m not sure how one would test for that sort of thing, but I’d love to know.
What do you think your pets make of words? If you have a talking bird, does the bird seem to both pick up phrases and understand words within phrases–for example, would your bird learn to call something “red block” and then apply “red” to other red things? Alex did, but he was taught to deconstruct language in a way that most birds aren’t.
Also, can you think of a way for me to test what my dogs make of language in general? I can think of how to figure out whether Spenser knows that “ball” means “ball”, but I don’t know how to determine what he thinks of words he doesn’t know. I guess Rico’s test of picking up an unfamiliar object sort of gets to that point, but not entirely… because he was hearing those words in a “command” scenario in which he knew what was being said had meaning because it was a command to him (as in, “Go get the doll.”, where it would all be presumed to have meaning because he was being told to do it.) What about casual conversation that happened around Rico
Thoughts? Words?
Current Bedside Reading: Nassir Ghaemei, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness
Commentary: Ghaemei has a thesis, all right. He believes (a) that certain world leaders had specific mental illnesses and that (b) these illnesses made them good leaders in times of crisis, though not necessarily good leaders at other times. I think there’s something in that–for example, Ghaemei cites the idea, now fairly well-established, that depressed people have a generally more realistic opinion of their chances of winning a lottery or getting cancer or having a car accident than mentally healthy people do. Mentally healthy people generally think things will go better for them than for the average person. They also, per Ghaemei, think Hitler can be reasoned with and that their military enemies aren’t as smart or good as they are. And so they are in for nasty surprises that would have been anticipated by depressives.
On the other hand, he first attributes hyperthymia to JFK and then analyses how it affected his leadership. Calling JFK hyperthymic may be fair comment, actually, but I’m not convinced hyperthemia is a disorder rather than a personality type and, if it is a disorder, I’m not sure where one crosses the line between energetic extrovert and hyperthymic person.
It’s an interesting book with some fair points, particularly about what “mentally healthy” people do and do not handle well, but I got a bit tired of Ghaemai confidently and forcefully stapling disorders to people and then driving ahead to his foregone conclusions.
My iPod Is Singing: “If you’re normal, the crowd will accept you. But, if you’re deranged, the crowd will make you their leader.”