Dogs and cats understand a lot of what is said to them. A recent study reveals that dogs accumulate pretty impressive human vocabularies without any specific instruction whatsoever. German researchers have found a border collie named Rico who understands more than 200 words and learns new ones as quickly as many children. Given a new name to fetch, he was able to go to the toy room and seven times out of 10, bring back the one he had not seen before. The dog seemingly understood that because he knew the names of all the other toys, the new one must be the one with the unfamiliar name.
Similarly a cat owner recalls how once when her cats were chasing after insects, the insects flew off and they sort of gave up until she asked them where the insects were. They looked at her quizzically and resumed the chase.
What is now emerging is that not only can animals understand language but have the ability to understand many different languages.
When Connie, a British expatriate offered to adopt a retiring police dog, she was warned that the dog was trained entirely in German, She was provided a list of all the German commands and their English translation. The police had her properly say each German command, immediately followed by the English command she would be using. It took maybe a week, definitely less than 2 weeks, before the dog knew every command in English.
I think all animals have the ability to pick up different languages. Their proficiency depends on what language is spoken in their home and how much they are treated as members of the family. My own dogs are multilingual. I speak to them in English and Hindi while the house staff address them in assorted tongues ranging from Bengali to Bhojpuri! They respond to all of us with equal ease. Similarly, the average chihuahua living in its native country would understand Spanish. Most chow chows would follow Cantonese or Mandarin. And many a poodle would be more familiar with French than my niece is even after two years of classes! In fact, animals are far better linguists than us. We talk to our cats and dogs all the time and they answer in grunts, barks or meows. While they are able to pick up any variety of human languages, we can mostly only guess what they are barking or mewing about.
Japanese researchers have found that pet birds can not only imitate sounds, they can distinguish between languages. They exposed Java Sparrows to English and Chinese translations of two well-known Japanese novels. They did not use Japanese because it was the language the birds normally listened to.
A bird sitting on a perch first listened to the English version and was only allowed to eat afterward. Then the researchers played the English and Chinese recordings randomly but only allowed the bird to eat after hopping onto the perch with the English. 75% of the time, the birds correctly identified the English recording. The same results were achieved with another two birds that were permitted to eat only when Chinese was played. "Humans are able to distinguish between languages, even ones they don't know, from the intonation and pronunciation, and it seems that birds have the same ability," said the professor who led the research.
And its not just for the birds , even educated mice can distinguish between different speech patterns. Neuroscientists in Barcelona report that rats, like humans (newborn and adult) can extract regular patterns in language from speech cues. A study of 16 rats showed that they were able to pick up enough cues from the rhythm and intonation of human speech to tell spoken Dutch from spoken Japanese. After the researchers trained rats to press a lever when hearing a synthesized five-second sentence in Dutch or Japanese, they tested the rats’ response to the alternative language. Rats rewarded for responding to Japanese did not respond to Dutch and vice versa. They pressed the lever only for the language to which they’d been exposed. Going a step further, they were able to differentiate new Dutch and Japanese sentences they had not heard before. According to the team,”It was striking to find that rats can track certain information that seems to be so important in language development in humans.’
This special ability to differentiate one type of speech from another has now been documented in three different mammalian species: Humans (both newborn and adult), rats and Tamarin monkeys. Professor Marc Hauser and his Harvard colleagues simultaneously tested the reactions of tamarin monkeys and French infants to the different sounds of Dutch and Japanese languages. Both listened to speakers of one language until they became bored. When the speakers switched to a new language, babies instantly showed a shift in attention by increasing the rate at which they sucked on pacifiers. The monkeys quickly looked in the direction of the speakers.
It’s not just the change in sound that attracts their attention. When the sentences are played backward, neither responds. "Playing the languages backward results in sounds that no vocal tract can produce," notes Hauser. "There’s nothing to discriminate."
This revolutionary direct comparison technique measuring the response of humans and other animals to the same stimuli using the same method showed that monkeys can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese as easily as human infants. This ability makes humans less special than previously believed, and ties our mental abilities more closely to our evolutionary kin. Hauser believes humans inherited the ability to process speech from our animal ancestors. "We don’t know yet what mechanisms in our brain allow us to discriminate between different languages, but we do know now that these mechanisms are not unique to humans.I believe that we inherited an ability to process speech from our primate ancestors (monkeys and apes)."
"Speech is a continuum of sound that we break up into categories," he notes. "Even crickets, which evolved billions of years ago, possess an ability to divide sounds into categories they avoid and categories they approach. Birds also break up sounds into categories, particularly songbirds. Looked at this way, it’s not so surprising that monkeys perceive sound boundaries, and that these boundaries occur in the same place in humans, their evolutionary cousins."
Animals not only understand human languages and other animal languages, but they also have a sense of telepathy. Try this game. Go into a room, keep quiet and think hard about your dog. Sooner or later, he will come and find you. More on animal telepathy in a future article.
Similarly a cat owner recalls how once when her cats were chasing after insects, the insects flew off and they sort of gave up until she asked them where the insects were. They looked at her quizzically and resumed the chase.
What is now emerging is that not only can animals understand language but have the ability to understand many different languages.
When Connie, a British expatriate offered to adopt a retiring police dog, she was warned that the dog was trained entirely in German, She was provided a list of all the German commands and their English translation. The police had her properly say each German command, immediately followed by the English command she would be using. It took maybe a week, definitely less than 2 weeks, before the dog knew every command in English.
I think all animals have the ability to pick up different languages. Their proficiency depends on what language is spoken in their home and how much they are treated as members of the family. My own dogs are multilingual. I speak to them in English and Hindi while the house staff address them in assorted tongues ranging from Bengali to Bhojpuri! They respond to all of us with equal ease. Similarly, the average chihuahua living in its native country would understand Spanish. Most chow chows would follow Cantonese or Mandarin. And many a poodle would be more familiar with French than my niece is even after two years of classes! In fact, animals are far better linguists than us. We talk to our cats and dogs all the time and they answer in grunts, barks or meows. While they are able to pick up any variety of human languages, we can mostly only guess what they are barking or mewing about.
Japanese researchers have found that pet birds can not only imitate sounds, they can distinguish between languages. They exposed Java Sparrows to English and Chinese translations of two well-known Japanese novels. They did not use Japanese because it was the language the birds normally listened to.
A bird sitting on a perch first listened to the English version and was only allowed to eat afterward. Then the researchers played the English and Chinese recordings randomly but only allowed the bird to eat after hopping onto the perch with the English. 75% of the time, the birds correctly identified the English recording. The same results were achieved with another two birds that were permitted to eat only when Chinese was played. "Humans are able to distinguish between languages, even ones they don't know, from the intonation and pronunciation, and it seems that birds have the same ability," said the professor who led the research.
And its not just for the birds , even educated mice can distinguish between different speech patterns. Neuroscientists in Barcelona report that rats, like humans (newborn and adult) can extract regular patterns in language from speech cues. A study of 16 rats showed that they were able to pick up enough cues from the rhythm and intonation of human speech to tell spoken Dutch from spoken Japanese. After the researchers trained rats to press a lever when hearing a synthesized five-second sentence in Dutch or Japanese, they tested the rats’ response to the alternative language. Rats rewarded for responding to Japanese did not respond to Dutch and vice versa. They pressed the lever only for the language to which they’d been exposed. Going a step further, they were able to differentiate new Dutch and Japanese sentences they had not heard before. According to the team,”It was striking to find that rats can track certain information that seems to be so important in language development in humans.’
This special ability to differentiate one type of speech from another has now been documented in three different mammalian species: Humans (both newborn and adult), rats and Tamarin monkeys. Professor Marc Hauser and his Harvard colleagues simultaneously tested the reactions of tamarin monkeys and French infants to the different sounds of Dutch and Japanese languages. Both listened to speakers of one language until they became bored. When the speakers switched to a new language, babies instantly showed a shift in attention by increasing the rate at which they sucked on pacifiers. The monkeys quickly looked in the direction of the speakers.
It’s not just the change in sound that attracts their attention. When the sentences are played backward, neither responds. "Playing the languages backward results in sounds that no vocal tract can produce," notes Hauser. "There’s nothing to discriminate."
This revolutionary direct comparison technique measuring the response of humans and other animals to the same stimuli using the same method showed that monkeys can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese as easily as human infants. This ability makes humans less special than previously believed, and ties our mental abilities more closely to our evolutionary kin. Hauser believes humans inherited the ability to process speech from our animal ancestors. "We don’t know yet what mechanisms in our brain allow us to discriminate between different languages, but we do know now that these mechanisms are not unique to humans.I believe that we inherited an ability to process speech from our primate ancestors (monkeys and apes)."
"Speech is a continuum of sound that we break up into categories," he notes. "Even crickets, which evolved billions of years ago, possess an ability to divide sounds into categories they avoid and categories they approach. Birds also break up sounds into categories, particularly songbirds. Looked at this way, it’s not so surprising that monkeys perceive sound boundaries, and that these boundaries occur in the same place in humans, their evolutionary cousins."
Animals not only understand human languages and other animal languages, but they also have a sense of telepathy. Try this game. Go into a room, keep quiet and think hard about your dog. Sooner or later, he will come and find you. More on animal telepathy in a future article.
