• Question: Can animals understand what we are saying?

    Asked by to Thon, Catherine, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Animals like dogs can understand simple commands (like “sit”) but generally they couldn’t understand a really complex question. Most animals that can understand human language essentially just listen for key words (like “walkies”) rather than understanding the whole sentence.

      There is an exception in that higher primates like gorillas have learnt to communicate. Koko the gorilla (from San Francisco Zoo) is able to understand as much as 1000 sign language signs and perhaps as much as 2000 words of spoken english. She even had pet kittens that she named Lipstick and Smokey. A bonobo called Kanzi also learnt to use a keyboard to communicate.

      So yes, animals can understand us and to varying degrees though it’s not particularly natural – think how much training it takes to get your dog to stay! Koko is very impressive but she had also been quite intensively trained for decades – so she certainly could never of learnt language as quickly, or learnt as much, as a human

    • Photo: Shaylon Stolk

      Shaylon Stolk answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Some domestic animals, like dogs, are very adept at ‘reading’ humans. They observe our body movements, our tone of voice, and our facial expressions as well as listening to our words.

      Parrots can understand and use human language. Alex the grey parrot even learned how to spell, and could answer questions in English!
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parrot%29#Accomplishments
      We think this is because in the wild, parrots live in flocks that include lots of different species. So they have to communicate with other bird species to survive.

    • Photo: Catherine Offord

      Catherine Offord answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      It’s tempting to believe that the answer is yes – but scientists have to be careful about testing what exactly it is that animals are understanding.

      A nice little example of people getting it wrong is the story of ‘Clever Hans’ the horse. A German called Wilhelm van Osten (what a name, huh?) owned a horse that he swore could be told to count to a certain number, and even add, subtract, multiply and divide. The horse impressed hundreds of spectators in shows around the country. Wilhelm would ask Hans the horse a question, like ‘What is 10 minus 4?’ and Hans would tap his hoof on the ground until he reached 6, when he stopped and the crowd burst into applause.

      Wilhelm truly believed his horse could understand and perform these calculations, as did his audiences, but a psychologist called Carl Stumpf later demonstrated that Hans could not count at all. Instead, Hans was responding to human behaviour.

      What Stumpf showed was that the horse wasn’t responding to the question, but was responding to the behaviour of the people watching. For example, in the question ‘what is 10 minus 4?’, people’s behaviour changed slightly when the hoof tapping reached 6. The owner became excited, the crowd held their breath, and Hans recognized these behaviours and stopped tapping. Every time Hans responded to these behaviours, he receivied a reward, and so learned to associate the behaviour and the reward.

      So although it appeared as though Hans could count, really he was learning what to associate with various human behaviours. This in itself is rather impressive, and also is a sort of ‘understanding what we are saying’ – but not understanding what we originally thought!

    • Photo: Anthony Caravaggi

      Anthony Caravaggi answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Further to the excellent answers given by the others, don’t forget that we can say many things without words.

      Apes are very visual and a lot of ape communication is based on facial expressions. This is one of the reasons apes, including humans of course, have hairless faces. When people make faces at the orang-utans, chimpanzees, or gorillas in zoos, the people think they’re just being silly, but the apes might be taking it a completely different way. We think we’re grinning back and to us grins are happy, but chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous (though some scientists think that the apes learn to ignore human nonsense and don’t misinterpret things. Captive animals might have different languages, too). If we use the correct expressions then other apes can easily understand our intentions.

      Then there’re smells. Our sense of smell isn’t great as things go, but dogs and many other animals have great senses of smell. And smell communicates a lot. It can tell animals when you’re scared, happy, unwell, and far more besides.

      These are just a couple of examples, but as you can see, even if animals don’t understand our words, they can understand us in many other ways.

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