I’ve checked him out, this kind of animal “speaking” always seemed like just a fun party trick, you can read anything into dog vocalizations. I expected nothing there, but in this clip (and only at 1:15) I can see him actually trying to mimic speech. But the rest is just reading on tea leaves. Like, there’s no chance in hell that the dog would know the word “werewolf” and know to use it in context as happens later in the video.
Real attentive caretakers will develop a private language and are sensitive to focus on part of the speech that the target gets. Doing this in a way that would follow “test protocol” could be very hard.
I can totally buy that the owner and the dog developed a private language of barks and whines loosely based on English. And yet dogs’ vocal cords and mouth are not made for producing human speech, while their paws are quite good at pressing buttons. If you spend all your time trying to make your dog actually vocalize English, you’ll never progress to the interesting stuff, and you’ll delude yourself into reading whatever you want into the sounds. I think that’s a dead-end as far as animal language research is concerned.
I too think that the main obstacle for bird and dogs is not being included in the culture. Not having your kids attend the level of primary school upbringing is a form of abuse in many places.
The human equivalent of not being included in the culture is not homeschooling, it’s growing feral being raised by wolves. And pets are surrounded by plenty of language. It only starts looking more interesting than blind pattern matching when you give them tools to actually use language instead of listening passively.
I understand that when a clear interpretaion is not super handy it is tempting to give up on it. However human mother will babble with their babies, they don’t deem their children incapable of speech if they don’t speak like they do.
Siris tea leaf reading is not partial to dogs.
There is also the mirror effect that because the buttons give them “perfect” vocalization there can be temptation that they mean more stuff with them.
Making a dog pronounce English at a human level seems impossible but that is why the barks and whines. There are regional human accent with humans with native languages have certain dialects in english. These can already hinder comprehension so atleast similar if not greater patience should be extended to “dog english”.
If it could be clearly established to which word each dog sound corresponds then the vocals would be as good as buttons. It is proper for a trainer to treat the distinguishable sounds as proper dialogue lines. Part of the buttons is that it makes the human confident that word was meant (human has less chance to think it is a meaningless wiff and has more pressure to treat it as intentional communication)
I did mean that homeschooling would be an adequate substitute but there is a diffrence of keeping your children sensory depirvation chamber in a cellar and giving a competent homeschooling. The expectations on what dogs can do and I tried to get afforded to do is very limited. We don’t diagnose people with dyslexia if they have never been introduced to the alphabeth (I guess it has forms that manifest that don’t depend on symbols, point is shortcomings need a baseline to stand out). The pets are around language ubt are they actually participating in the language games, is management of things that matter to them done throught language? People do not babble with their dogs and in that they are on uneven ground with babies.
Sure the dog understand some words, better but hr can sometimes hold coversation to the point that he can participate in an argument. Even if doing vocals “ruins” it somehow the burden of what is enough of a demonstration of “getting it” with buttons. That is in a “problem of other minds” kind of level problem of why we don’t attribute humans to be “merely” tea leaf reading when we are communicating (and some would probably argue that we actually communicate much less than we think we do).
This is partly why the difference between Sherpa and K’eyush is interesting. Sherpa actually really on board with the content but to an untrained ear it seems very similar.
I’ve checked him out, this kind of animal “speaking” always seemed like just a fun party trick, you can read anything into dog vocalizations. I expected nothing there, but in this clip (and only at 1:15) I can see him actually trying to mimic speech. But the rest is just reading on tea leaves. Like, there’s no chance in hell that the dog would know the word “werewolf” and know to use it in context as happens later in the video.
https://youtu.be/dxBpESjiefo?t=75
Siri does understand his “hello”, but “I know he can” a few seconds later is a ridiculous reach. The dog was just repeating his “hello” vocalization.
https://youtu.be/yqCMA2Pm-IY?t=85
I can totally buy that the owner and the dog developed a private language of barks and whines loosely based on English. And yet dogs’ vocal cords and mouth are not made for producing human speech, while their paws are quite good at pressing buttons. If you spend all your time trying to make your dog actually vocalize English, you’ll never progress to the interesting stuff, and you’ll delude yourself into reading whatever you want into the sounds. I think that’s a dead-end as far as animal language research is concerned.
The human equivalent of not being included in the culture is not homeschooling, it’s growing feral being raised by wolves. And pets are surrounded by plenty of language. It only starts looking more interesting than blind pattern matching when you give them tools to actually use language instead of listening passively.
I understand that when a clear interpretaion is not super handy it is tempting to give up on it. However human mother will babble with their babies, they don’t deem their children incapable of speech if they don’t speak like they do.
Siris tea leaf reading is not partial to dogs.
There is also the mirror effect that because the buttons give them “perfect” vocalization there can be temptation that they mean more stuff with them.
Making a dog pronounce English at a human level seems impossible but that is why the barks and whines. There are regional human accent with humans with native languages have certain dialects in english. These can already hinder comprehension so atleast similar if not greater patience should be extended to “dog english”.
If it could be clearly established to which word each dog sound corresponds then the vocals would be as good as buttons. It is proper for a trainer to treat the distinguishable sounds as proper dialogue lines. Part of the buttons is that it makes the human confident that word was meant (human has less chance to think it is a meaningless wiff and has more pressure to treat it as intentional communication)
I did mean that homeschooling would be an adequate substitute but there is a diffrence of keeping your children sensory depirvation chamber in a cellar and giving a competent homeschooling. The expectations on what dogs can do and I tried to get afforded to do is very limited. We don’t diagnose people with dyslexia if they have never been introduced to the alphabeth (I guess it has forms that manifest that don’t depend on symbols, point is shortcomings need a baseline to stand out). The pets are around language ubt are they actually participating in the language games, is management of things that matter to them done throught language? People do not babble with their dogs and in that they are on uneven ground with babies.
Sure the dog understand some words, better but hr can sometimes hold coversation to the point that he can participate in an argument. Even if doing vocals “ruins” it somehow the burden of what is enough of a demonstration of “getting it” with buttons. That is in a “problem of other minds” kind of level problem of why we don’t attribute humans to be “merely” tea leaf reading when we are communicating (and some would probably argue that we actually communicate much less than we think we do).
This is partly why the difference between Sherpa and K’eyush is interesting. Sherpa actually really on board with the content but to an untrained ear it seems very similar.