"I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura."

Kevy Baby · 05-21-2008, 07:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alex

That's not true. If you did the same thing to me in Swedish I wouldn't have a clue.

But you would probably have a chance to at least know it was Swedish, German or Swahili, whereas to the the dog, it would all be the same gibberish.

Ya know... I really need to STFU and do some research for links here.

Stan4dSteph · 05-22-2008, 12:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Ya know... I really need to STFU and do some research for links here.

If you read the article that 3894 linked to above, there are a lot of references to academic papers; those are usually available online if recent, but not usually for free.

Cadaverous Pallor · 05-22-2008, 07:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

But you would probably have a chance to at least know it was Swedish, German or Swahili, whereas to the the dog, it would all be the same gibberish.

If you spoke to me in various African languages, I wouldn't know which was which.

As said above - a dog is taught a word to mean "roll over". If you taught a human the same trick using the same word, the human would think that word meant "roll over", same as the dog does.