Apparently there is debate among linguists as to whether animals can actually understand . Geoffrey Pullum, a linguistics professor, believes the response of animals to talking is just their capability of associating large numbers of aural stimuli with particular behavioral responses....not their 'understanding' of language. Yet others disagree.

Your thoughts?

I don't think there's much debate among linguists. We all know dogs can understand words; Rico's abilities are that in a high degree plus some other intelligence, but no linguist could possibly describe any of that as understanding language.

The possibility of language doesn't even come into it, from what I've seen. Even Rico's trainers aren't claiming he uses syntax. The debate does exist about apes: trainers claim the apes make two-word sentences (or even longer), and most linguists who study transcripts (not the edited highlights) are deeply unconvinced that there's anything systematic in how signs are arranged together.

Here's Geoff Pullum's article "So now it's dogs that understand language (sigh)", in which he draws a distinction between recognizing words and understanding language (though I don't think he's explicit enough about what the latter is, viz syntax and productivity). Of several other Language Log responses, Mark Liberman's "Signs or symbols? Words or tools?" gives a number of views of what exactly animals might be doing when they respond to words.

One thing that wasn't clear from writings about Rico is whether the words for him mean an individual object or its type (does 'ball' get him to fetch any ball available, or his one toy ball?). Another is how he associates objects: if he knows about 'bone', does it mean bones and things like bones (as we humans would understand likeness), or does it include places to get bones, actions you do to get bones, and so on?

Rico's extraordinary ability is to learn new words by a process of elimination: he sees an unfamiliar (unnamed) object and works out the new word must be its name. Assuming this research is valid, this is an amazing intelligence. But it's still just learning words: it tells us something about animal precursors of language, perhaps, but nothing about language.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: aput,

Yes, aput, I am sorry I wasn't clear about the difference between dogs understanding words versus language. What had Pullum fuming was that the headlines of the AP news report was "Research Shows Dogs Understand Language." Pullum made his opinions of reporters quite clear in that language log, and I have posted about that elsewhere.

Of course, I don't have a Rico. However, we do have a rather intelligent Border Collie (most of them are), and she does seem to understand words. Yet, sometimes, I wonder if she is just hearing the inflection of my voice or watching my movements or receiving other cues, rather than really understanding the word. Our other Border Collie, who I think was even smarter than this one, used to hear me rip off a check when I was paying bills, and each time she would run to the door. She knew that on that last rip I'd head out to the mailbox, taking her along.

Intonation is fine as part of a word: human-English isn't tonal but dog-English presumably is. You could test this, by whether "sit" in a soothing or bantering tone produces the required effect. Even if commands like "sit" and "stay" had different intonations, they'd be part of the word the dog was understanding.

You would have something language-like if it could understand "daddy" in two senses, say "take it to daddy" and "where's daddy?", reacting differently to each one, and also to "fetch the ball" and "where's your ball?". If it understood all four utterances properly, you could say it understood the question/command "where's?" and could combine it syntactically with names.

Apes utter combinations like "Koko hurt" to express the fact that they're hurt, and even "Koko hurt arm" if they've hurt their arm. But that's what I mean by edited highlights. If you look at full transcripts you find they also say "hurt Koko", "Koko hurt Koko", "arm arm hurt arm Koko", "arm Koko water hurt hurt hurt Koko", and so on. They know to combine signs, but it's not organized in a language-like way. There's (as far as I recall) doubt about whether they even make the subject/object distinction linguistically: is there even a tendency for "Koko hurt" rather than "hurt Koko" to be used for one meaning or the other?

This is the criterion for language-like behaviour: a combination of signs where the combination has meaning above that of the signs.

It's with great trepidation that I venture to question aput, for I know he is far more knowledgeable than I about such thing. He says, "They know to combine signs, but it's not organized in a language-like way. There's (as far as I recall) doubt about whether they even make the subject/object distinction linguistically... This is the criterion for language-like behaviour: a combination of signs where the combination has meaning above that of the signs.

Who says it doesn't count as "language" unless it's "properly" organized? Or if they do not understand the distinction between a subject and an object? Granted that humans have language skills superior to those of apes, but could it be that the selection of this particular criterion reflects mainly a wishful desire to think of "language" as our unique province, and to set the criterion accordingly?

As to the possible subject-object confusion, it may be worth noting that English differs from many other language in that it relies upon word-order to distinguish subject from object. English sentences typically plod forward with a Subject-Verb or Subject-Verb-Object structure. As I understand it, other languages instead use endings to distinguish subject from object, and their word-order is far more varied. I believe Old English was one such language. I wonder what would have happened if Koko had been taught such a language.

(Actually, "the" criterion was wrong, but it's the criterion that's pertinent here.)

Well, organization is the criterion that's linguistically interesting, it's what linguists study. If you want to say that unorganized word use counts as language use, then fine, but then we all know that dogs, apes, whales, canaries, cats, bees, and all sorts of other animals use or understand this kind of animal language. It's a legitimate topic of study for animal psychologists, but it's not the interesting thing about human language. The human equivalent is cries, grunts, sighing, laughing: communicative noises. Linguists call this communication, and reserve the word 'language' for the structured use that can refer to distant and hypothetical situations and can be arbitrarily complex.

On subject/object marking, I'm not sure of the details, but most of these apes were taught ASL, and I think that has OS order. As a language ASL is said to resemble Navaho more than English in its grammatical structures, but I don't know if it has object marking.

What's in question is if Koko even uses two-word syntax. That is, does "hurt Koko" have a tendency to mean something other than "Koko hurt", or are they in free variation? If Koko is the subject, does he show either SO or OS order? It could be either - Kokoese could be like English or like ASL. But you need at least a statistical tendency to prefer one over the other, to say there is a syntactic meaning.

Next question is how the object is marked. Is this also done by word order, or by additional words/markers? Any marking is effectively a third word: "Koko-OBJ hurt" or "Koko hurt-PASS". If two-element syntax hasn't been found, it's even less likely there'll be three-element syntax.

The search is not for a particular syntactic form but for any kind of syntax as any human language has it. From the scepticism of linguists who've studied it, I have to presume none has been found so far.