Yawn. This recipe even right? Doesn’t really look like fo— Food Food Foo—Food. Food. What are you three getting up to? I found a video on Tiktok of this woman who’s teaching her dog to talk with these buttons! I love the one where the dog says she’s “concerned” when she’s out of treats. Her name is Bunny, and she has Let’s- let’s- let’s get into it! three and a half million followers! We wanted to see if it’s really possible, so we’re teaching Matcha some words! That’s— Food. —fascinating! Everyone knows that dogs are smart, but is it really possible to teach a dog to speak English? I wonder… You might be familiar with viral Tik Tok star Bunny, a young sheepadoodle mix who has been learning to talk with the help of her human Alexis Devine. Here she is asking about a mailman. Stranger. This. Went. This stranger went? This stranger went where? And another time when she said she wanted to go to the beach. Beach. All done beach. We’ll go beach tomorrow. All done. She was inspired by speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger, who used a set of recordable buttons to better communicate with her 18-month-old puppy Stella. According to Christina, Stella understands 29 whole words, and can formulate 5-word sentences. Christina started by talking to Stella every day, and making note of the words that she used with her puppy most often, things like “outside”, “eat”, and “sleep”. She then mapped those common words to individual buttons, and would use them with her vocal commands. Basically, if she was going to take Stella for a walk, she might say “walk” out loud, then push a button with the word “walk” recorded, and then take Stella out. That way Stella would associate going for a walk with the vocal cue and the recorded cue, and eventually use the button to signal that she wants to go out. It’s adorable, but I’m not an expert dog trainer. Brew, do you know how dog training works? Well, I mean, I know a little bit. Dog training uses a technique called operant conditioning developed by Psychologist B.F. Skinner who studied under Russian Psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov, if you’re not familiar, studied animal behaviour, and discovered that it was possible to teach dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Pavlov realized that dogs would automatically salivate when they were given food, so he set out to associate the sound of a bell with food by ringing it before the dogs were fed. What he discovered was that an unconditioned stimulus, salivation from being fed, could be connected to a neutral stimulus, the ringing of the bell, to create a conditioned response, salivation after hearing a bell, a relationship he called “classical conditioning”. B.F. Skinner took Pavlov’s ideas one step further. He wanted to see if it was possible to create specific behaviour responses using reinforcers which are considered “rewards” which encourage behaviour or “punishers” which discourage behaviour. Both rewards and punishments can be either positive or negative. Positive refers to the addition of something, and negative refers to the removal of something. For example, you’re petting your dog, and he starts jumping on you. You’d rather he didn’t behave that way. So you stop petting him, turn around, and ignore him. This is a negative punishment. You remove the positive reward of your attention, allowing your dog to disconnect the association of that particular behavior with a reward! You punish by removing something your dog wants. Using a positive reward has been cited by experts to be much more effective than using a positive punishment like yanking on a dog's collar when they pull on the leash, or a negative reward, like using a choke collar which stops the choking when they stop pulling. Ew, choke collars. You said it, girl. We can appreciate that language for operant conditioning concepts can get a little confusing. So we’ve made a graphic here to help you out! Feel free to paws and take notes. Behaviourism works on all animals, but it’s especially efficient on our doggos because years of evolution have bred them to respond particularly well to human commands. Dogs evolved alongside humans, and developed traits that would help them adapt to our lifestyles because of it. The oldest confirmed fossils belonging to domesticated canids date back around 14,000 years, but the circumstances of domestication are foggy. Some believe that it began when early humans captured wolf pups, and kept them as pets, slowly domesticating them over several generations. Another theory, as posed by the director of the Duke University Canine Cognition Center, Brian Hare, argues that domestication likely began much earlier than the first fossilized remains would suggest. He notes that “anyone who has spent time with wild wolves would see how unlikely it was that we somehow tamed them in a way that led to domestication”. Instead, Hare suggests that the rise of large scale farming, and the following surplus of food, incentivised wolf populations to live closer to humans. Once humans and wolves were in the same area, the friendliest wolves were the ones who received the most food from us. Over time, aggression was slowly bred out of their genetics. Not only that, modern day dogs possess a very specific enzyme called "Amylase" that allows them to digest starch, like potatoes and rice, adding credence to the theory that early canines scavenged from humans performing agriculture. The canine populations living with humans were the ones who diverged from their wolfine ancestors to become uniquely skilled at doing what humans want them to do. Like catching a frisbee. And herding livestock, but yeah you get what I mean. Speaking of what humans want, we all want online shopping to be easy, but it seems like finding coupon codes that actually work is harder than training a dog to speak. Not so with this video’s sponsor, Honey! The free online shopping add-on that helps you find promo codes for all your favourite products! Honey works on all your favorite sites, from Amazon to eBay. All you have to do is make sure you have the Honey browser extension enabled, and it’ll automatically find relevant discounts for your purchases like dog treats, and squeak toys. Just click “Apply Coupons”, Honey will scan the internet for valid coupon codes. I always want the best for Matcha, and Honey saved me 58 dollars and 48 cents! It’s so nice, because it’s stuff I have to get anyway, like festive bandanas and yummy treats, so Honey just makes it easier for me to spoil my baby. Honey supports over 30,000 online stores, so you can find pretty much anything you need! We’re all already buying things online, so why pass up the chance at saving some money? It’s just one click, and it’s 100% free! Just go to joinhoney.com/brew to sign up and install Dogs are genetically predisposed to be able to Just go to joinhoney.com/brew to sign up and install the extension to your browser for instant savings. We’ll also link it in the description box! Thanks, honey. Thanks, honey, thanks! interpret and understand human commands, but to figure out if they can talk, first we should figure out what language is in the first place. Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, developed a theory of how words contain and convey meaning. He argued that a word, or as he put it, the linguistic sign, consists of two main parts: the signifier, and the signified. Take the word “coffee” for example. The letters and the sound of the word “coffee” is the signifier, and the signified is the metaphysical concept of “coffee”. The linguistic sign is when they work together successfully. Wait, what do you mean by “successfully” how can a word fail? Consider if you, as a person, had never seen or heard of coffee before. How dreadful. If I said the word coffee, it wouldn’t mean anything to you. The signifier is still referring to the signified, but since you don’t know what it means, they don’t connect. The sound is arbitrary, it’s not like the word “coffee” looks or sounds like what coffee is. Ohh, I think I get it. So it’s like a word can be anything, all that matters is whether or not everyone agrees that a particular word refers to a particular thing? Exactly! That’s how slang develops too. When I talk to Matcha, it seems like she knows what I’m saying. Of course! But there is a difference between talking and communication though, and that’s super important to this discussion. Speech is the ability to convey information using articulate mouth sounds and language, whereas communication is simply the imparting of information. All speech is communication, not all communication is speech. By this standard, no, dogs can’t talk by way of speech. They don’t have the same muscles to form words as we do. That being said, I do have some good news for you dog people out there. A study by Atilla Andics, for the journal Science, put 13 dogs into fMRI machines to see what areas of the brain lit up with certain commands. They found that dogs have a distinct region of the brain where they store meaningful words, and another to store the intonation of how those words are said. In addition to that, they saw the dogs primary reward centers light up whenever they received words and intonation that were consistent with praise. Long story short, dogs do understand words they hear often, they understand how we say those words, and they love being told that they’re a good boy! Ruff! Yes, forgive me. Good girls too. So by this metric, dogs can connect the signifier to a specific act. For example, if you teach your dog to sit when you tell them to, they do understand the connection between the word “sit” and the act of “sitting” the same way you or I would. However, whether or not that they understand that when they sit, that what they are doing is the act of “sitting” is another thing entirely. Oh! So it’s like giving directions to someone who doesn’t speak your language. You might be able to get them to understand where to go through context clues, but they don’t actually understand what you’re saying. Communication happened, but language failed. Spot on! To conclude, No one is debating whether or not dogs are smart. It’s well known that our favourite furry friends can express emotions and understand human cadence. If you’re at all familiar with dog body language, you know that when a dog is happy its tail wags, or when it’s agitated, you see the hair on their back rise. Just because an animal, or a human for that matter, doesn’t outright say what they’re feeling, doesn’t mean they aren’t communicating it to you. Thousands of years of evolution and friendship have made them the perfect companions for all walks of life, but if we hold dogs up to human standards, then no, they probably can’t talk. The muscles that humans use to talk are the result of tens of thousands of years of evolution, and no amount of selective breeding will guarantee dogs evolve those same muscles. That being said, it is certainly possible to train your little fur baby to use buttons mapped with human words in order for them to more easily communicate their needs to you, but if you know your dog well enough, you might not even need to. coffee is bae Doesn’t mean it isn’t fun though. If you enjoyed the video, post a comment and hit the like button! To keep up on all the late-night rabbit hole deep dives, consider subscribing to Brew's channel! 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