Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [40]
There is one celebrated dog whose word usage is exceptional. Rico, a border collie in Germany, can identify over two hundred toys by name. Given an enormous heap of all the toys and balls he has ever seen, he can reliably pull out and retrieve the one his owner requests. Now, putting aside why a dog might need two hundred toys, this ability is impressive. Children are hard-pressed to do the same task (and are only sometimes helpful in bringing things back). Even better, Rico can quickly learn a name for a new object, by process of elimination. Experimenters put a novel toy among familiar ones and asked him, using a word he had never heard before, to retrieve it. Go get the snark, Rico. One would be sympathetic if he looked bemused, and wandered back with a favorite toy in his chops. Instead, though, Rico reliably picked out the new toy: naming it.
Rico was not using language, of course, in the way we, or even young children, do. One can debate how much he was understanding, or if he was even doing anything other than showing a preference for the new object. On the other hand, he was showing an astute ability to satisfy the humans making various sounds by picking up the referents of those sounds. His ability might not indicate that all dogs are so able: Rico might be an unusually skilled word user*
—and he is definitely unusually motivated by the praise received on retrieving the right toy. Still, even if he were the only dog who does this, it indicates that the dog's cognitive equipment is good enough to understand language in the right context.
It is not only the express content or sound of speech that carries meaning. Being a competent language user means understanding the pragmatics of usage: how the means, form, and context of what you say also affect the meaning of what you say. Paul Grice, a twentieth-century philosopher, famously described various "conversational maxims," known to us implicitly, that regulate language use. Their use marks you as a cooperative speaker; even their express violation is often meaningful. They include the charming maxim of relation (be relevant), the maxim of manner (be brief and clear), and maxims of quality (tell the truth) and quantity (say only as much as you need to).
On a good day, dogs mind all of Grice's maxims. Consider a dog who espies a roguish-looking fellow down the street. The dog may bark (relevant: the guy is roguish-looking) sharply (quite unambiguous), but only as long as the fellow is around (so the warning bark is currently true), and not more than a few times (relatively pithy). While dogs hardly qualify as competent language users, it is notably not because of their violation of the pragmatics of communication. It is only the smallness of their vocabulary and restricted use of words in combination that disqualifies them.
Many owners lament that, by contrast to Rico, their dogs are not terrific listeners—despite their broad range of audition. To be fair, canids do not rely on hearing as their primary sense. Relative to even our hearing, their ability to pinpoint where a sound is coming from is imprecise. They hear sounds unmoored from their origins. And just like us, they must bring attention to a noise to hear it best—first apparent in the familiar tilt of the head, to direct the ears slightly toward the sound source, or in radar-dish adjustments of the pinnae. Instead of being used to "see" the source of the sound, their auditory sense seems to serve an ancillary function: helping dogs find the general direction of a sound, at which point they can turn on a more acute sense, like olfaction or even vision, to investigate further.
Dogs themselves make a variety of sounds across a range of pitches or differing only by subtle alterations in tempo or frequency. They are downright