Silence, Talking, & Dogs

I've been writing a bit about communication, language, talking, speech lately---this is one of my favorite topics, and not only because of all the hours days years time we've been sitting on the floor with Charlie or observing him arranging things. It's actually because of something that not's about Charlie, but about me. (The animals come in a bit later.)

I was no talker when I was a child. Indeed I was quite the antithesis of a talker. I was extremely shy (my mom has told me that I would burst into tears if someone said "hi" to me or just looked my way; only my parents and one favorite uncle were "allowed" to carry me, or I'd really cry). I just really did not like talking and it wasn't until I was a junior in college that I started to raise my hand to answer questions. (In other words, I spent years and years desperately hoping that I wouldn't be called on.) And, when I did start to try to volunteer answers to questions, from the moment I raised my hand my heart would be beating doubly or triply fast, my face and palms got hot, my stomach caved, and by the time when (if) I got called, I started by mumbling out something incoherent.

In college, I was an editor for an "alternative newspaper." Many member of the staff were much more verbally dexterous than me and I suspect that trying to keep up with them during regular all-nighters to get the paper out honed my own ability to talk. Jim hails from the part of (northern) New Jersey where many of those college friend were from, so I guess you could say I've had many more years to finesse my verbal sparring skills, and teaching students from the age of middle school teaches one to be quick on one's feet, and with words.

Maybe some of this is why, while always wishing that Charlie was able to talk more (how different things would be if he could just tell us what bothered him at school), I've often felt that, talking or not, he's always communicating something, even if in fragments and bits of words and sounds. And so I had a bit of an odd feeling about some things in a recent Scientific American article about whether or not dogs can talk.

The general consensus among scientists is that some dogs can do a pretty good job mimicking the sounds that humans make, but whether or not they are really saying "I love you" ("Ahh rooo uuu!") and meaning it, is not likely. Rather, a dog may have learned to make those certain sounds ("Ahh rooo uuu!"/"I love you") at certain moments (after getting the Science Diet). (Sorry if that was a bit flippant; we don't have a dog and Charlie continues to keep a healthy distance between optimus amicus hominis and himself; hearing a dog barking while he's on his bike has been known to make him get off the bike, put down the kickstand, and start running.) (Yes, Jim is following close by.)

From the Scientific American article:

It's more appropriate to call it imitating than talking, says Gary Lucas, a visiting scholar in psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. Dogs vocalize with each other to convey emotions—and they express their emotions by varying their tones, he says. So it pays for dogs to be sensitive to different tones. Dogs are able to imitate humans as well as they do because they pick up on the differences in our tonal patterns.

Lucas likens this behavior to that of bonobos, primates that can imitate some tonal patterns, including vowel sounds, pitch changes, and rhythms, studies show. "The vocal skills of some of the dogs and cats on YouTube suggest that they might also have some selective tonal imitation skills," he says.

What's happening between dog and owner-turned-voice-coach is fairly straightforward, [Stanley] Coren says: Owner hears the dog making a sound that resembles a phrase, says the phrase back to the dog, who then repeats the sound and is rewarded with a treat. Eventually the dog learns a modified version of her original sound. As Lucas puts it, "dogs have limited vocal imitation skills, so these sounds usually need to be shaped by selective attention and social reward."

In the Letterman video "a pug says, 'I love you' and it's very cute, but the pug has no idea what it means," Coren says. "If dogs could talk, they would tell you, 'I'm just in it for the cookies.'"

And certainly what do people think of when behavioral science---ABA, the basis of Charlie's education since he was 2---is mentioned? Yes, Pavlov's dog.

Leaving criticisms of ABA as "dog training" aside (done right, it is nothing of the sort), Charlie's learning to talk followed similar steps. He learned to imitate and then to imitate sounds. As he struggled with apraxia, his articulation of syllables and sounds (and so of words) was very unclear; Charlie's "I love you" was just as likely to sound like "Ahh rooo uuu."

And maybe I'm reading too much into his words, but I do think he knows what he means when he says that phrase.