Can your dog understand Klingon?

Most of us who own a dog can agree that dogs are smart and respond to commands directly spoken; Sit, Roll Over, Dinner, all result in your dog making the response you desire.

Likewise, put one of these words into a sentence and with the right tone of voice your dog will almost certainly respond as you intend – “Time for your walk” and he’ll be at the door. “Time for dinner” will see him at his food bowl. "XYX is coming home" will see him jump around in excitement if that person is someone your dog is bonded with – It’s hard not to accept that dogs do have the ability to understand words and make word associations.

Taking my own dog, Jake – a 7 year old F1 Standard Labradoodle, he certainly seems to translate what I say to deliver or comply with what I (or very often he) wants.

Labradoodles are a hybrid of the Poodle & Labrador two dogs that respectively score as the second and seventh smartest dog breeds (Source: The Intelligence of Dogs by Dr Stanley Coren ) so Jake is smart by dog standards. But, can he process language and assemble the phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of what I say? And then dissemble the ambiguity and understand what I am actually saying to him?

To illustrate the point I am making I will borrow from work on natural language processing in computing (https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist238/1.pdf).

Lending from this paper I illustrate my point with the sentence;“I made her Duck”

Here’s five different meanings this sentence could have (there are more), each of which exemplifies an ambiguity at some level:

(1.1) I cooked waterfowl for her. (1.2) I cooked waterfowl belonging to her. (1.3) I created the (plaster?) duck she owns. (1.4) I caused her to quickly lower her head or body. (1.5) I waved my magic wand and turned her into undifferentiated waterfowl.

These different meanings are caused by a number of ambiguities. First, the words duck and her are morphologically or syntactically ambiguous in their part-of-speech. Duck can be a verb or a noun, while her can be adaptive pronoun or a possessive pronoun. Second, the word make is semantically ambiguous; it can mean create or cook. Finally, the verb make is syntactically ambiguous in a different way. Make can be transitive, that is, taking a single direct object (1.2), or it can be ditransitive, that is, taking two objects (1.5), meaning that the first object (her) got made into the second object (duck). Finally, make can take a direct object and a verb (1.4), meaning that the object (her) got caused to perform the verbal action (duck). Furthermore, in a spoken sentence, there is an even deeper kind of ambiguity; the first word could have been eye or the second word maid.

Clearly Jake cannot resolve this type of ambiguity. So maybe to Jake how I say something is more important than the "what" of the thing I am actually saying? Does he assemble my meaning from a combination of my voice and body language rather than process the actual words to arrive at what I am actually requiring from him? Does he read more into a combination of my voice and body language rather than process the actual words?

I think it is common ground to all dog owners that their dog focuses on them as the pack leader and observes their tone of speech together with all the physical clues they give them to determine what they (the owner) want them (the dog) to do or not do. Dogs don’t just listen, they watch expressions, body posture and movements and combine all of these clues to determine meaning.

Rationally You have got to agree that this is the most likely answer to how any dog understands what its human owner wants from it or for it to do.

But, like me do you play around to test this? Do you substitute words, speak in monotone, turn your back on your dog when speaking and generally try to make it hard for your dog to interpret your speech and intentions just to see what happens?

Certainly, when I play this game with him Jake can make the correct connection after at most three to five repetitions of the words or pattern I have used. So I have to accept he has a vocabulary and an ability to process speech and filter ambiguity?

Researchers have placed dogs understood vocabulary in the range of low hundreds to around 1,000 words; so in the same way I can understand spoken French (badly with a very limited vocabulary) maybe Jake can understand Klingon?

To try it with your dog according to translate.com the Klingon word for “Walk” is “Ylt”