A very smart collie dog named Rico has stunned German researchers by learning words with the apparent flair of a young child, Science magazine reports.Kacelnik's speculation about smells is just that - speculation - but it occurs to me that without meaning to, it raises a real issue. What underlies his argument is the notion that language is to be described in terms of sounds. Put another way, he's equating language itself with human language.
Rico understands more than 200 words and can work out the meaning of new ones, by a process of elimination.
What is more, Rico can often remember new words after a whole month - even though he has only heard them once before, the scientists claim. ...
From the study of a German family's Border collie, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology say that some aspects of speech comprehension evolved earlier than, and separate from, human speech. ...
Julia Fischer and colleagues set up experiments in which a new toy was placed amongst seven familiar toys.
When Rico was asked to fetch the new item, using a name it had never heard before, he correctly retrieved it in seven out of 10 attempts.
The researchers say that he appreciates, as do young children, that new words tend to belong to objects that do not already have names. ...
A month later, having been denied access to the new toys, Rico could often still remember the new names. ...
Rico's performance, say scientists, is comparable to a three-year-old child.
Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for life sciences, said: "Such fast, one-trail learning in dogs is remarkable."
"This ability suggests that the brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans and may have formed the evolutionary basis of some of the advanced language abilities of humans." ...
We humans are always on the lookout for language ability in other animals, but is Rico really demonstrating that?
Alex Kacelnik, a behavioural ecologist from Oxford University, UK, believes he might not be. ...
Rico is good at linking concepts, Professor Kacelnik believes, but that does not mean he has a special predisposition to understand language.
"From the point of view of Rico, there may not be anything special about sounds," he explained. "We don't know that Rico has a particular ability to link sounds to objects, rather than link any arbitrary stimulus to objects.
"I suspect it would be the case that if we used 200 different smells Rico would perform better." ...
"Rico probably has the general ability to connect things - not a language ability."
But is that right? Is it the only possibility? What does it mean "to language?"
It would seem to me that language, or perhaps more accurately the idea of languaging - would better be described as the ability to transmit information by applying an abstract meaning to some form of sensory input. If indeed, Rico would do better with smells, if say the smell of a certain flavor Ken-L Ration dog biscuit could also signify "the red ball," doesn't that, rather than discrediting the idea that what he's showing is a language ability, instead raise the possibility of a smell-based language?
There, there, Bonnie. It's okay, it's just because they don't know you. Good girl.
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