Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [39]
This is not to say that animals might not understand some of our language use, even if they don't produce it themselves. There are, for instance, many examples of animals taking advantage of the communicative system of nearby unrelated animal species. Monkeys can make use of nearby birds' warning calls of a nearby predator to themselves take protective action. Even an animal who deceives another animal by mimicry—which some snakes, moths, and even flies can do—is in some way using another species's language.
The research with dogs suggests that they do understand language—to a limited degree. On the one hand, to say that dogs understand words is a misnomer. Words exist in a language, which itself is product of a culture; dogs are participants in that culture on a very different level. Their framework for understanding the application of the word is entirely different. There is, no doubt, more to the words of their world than Gary Larson's Far Side comics suggest: eat, walk, and fetch. But he is on to something, insofar as these are organizing elements of their interaction with us: we circumscribe the dog's world to a small set of activities. Working dogs seem miraculously responsive and focused compared to city pets. It is not that they are innately more responsive or focused, but that their owners have added to their vocabularies types of things to do.
One component in understanding a word is the ability to discriminate it from other words. Given their sensitivity to the prosody of speech, dogs do not always excel at this. Try asking your dog on one morning to go for a walk; on the next, ask if your dog wants to snow forty locks in the same voice. If everything else remains the same, you'll probably get the same, affirmative reaction. The very first sounds of an utterance seem to be important to dog perception, though, so changing the swallowed consonants for articulated ones and the long vowels for short ones—ma for a polk?—might prompt the confusion merited by this gibberish. Of course humans read meaning into prosody, too. English does not give the prosody of speech syntactical leverage but it is still part of how we interpret "what has just been said."
If we were more sensitive to the sound of what we say to dogs, we might get better responses from them. High-pitched sounds mean something different than low sounds; rising sounds contrast with falling sounds. It is not accidental that we find ourselves cooing to an infant in silly, giddy tones (called motherese)—and might greet a wagging dog with similar baby talk. Infants can hear other speech sounds, but they are more interested in motherese. Dogs, too, respond with alacrity to baby talk—partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads. Moreover, they will come more easily to high-pitched and repeated call requests than to those at a lower pitch. What is the ecology behind this? High-pitched sounds are naturally interesting to dogs: they might indicate the excitement of a tussle or the shrieking of nearby injured prey. If a dog fails to respond to your reasonable suggestion that he come right now, resist the urge to lower and sharpen your tone. It indicates your frame of mind—and the punishment that might ensue for