Scientists in Budapest have discovered that dogs pick words out of human speech the same way babies do. They claim we listen for the consonants. The consonants, apparently, are the only things keeping language from dissolving into a lazy, breathy soup.
I let this land, without comment, keeping my eye on his toast in case he forgot my immediate needs.
Let me describe human speech from the receiving end. It arrives as one long, unbroken noise, like the river in minor flood. There are no gaps.
You people don’t pause between words. You just keep going until you need a breath or a biscuit. To make sense of it, we have to find the hard edges: the Ts, the Ks, the Bs. Those are the snags in the river. The vowels are just the water rushing over them.
This is not a technique. It is survival. Any dog who waited for the vowels to mean something would have starved long ago.
Take the evidence from my own household. When the Boss wants action from me, it’s something like “overhereandonyerbed”, That is almost entirely vowel. It carries no information to my benefit, so I wait until he recites it more slowly — with that rattle of irritation.
But when he mumbles “I suppose it’s dinner time” under his breath, New Boy and I are pelting for the back door with the speed of startled gazelles.
The researchers at Eötvös Loránd University — a name with more vowels than it needs — wired up 20 dogs and 20 people and played them made-up words. The dogs’ brains picked out the consonants the same way the humans did.
Other mammals, it seems, can’t manage this. That won’t surprise cat owners, will it?
One of the photographs showed a Labrador yawning in the middle of the experiment, which captures my feelings on modern behavioural science to the letter.
What interests me is not the finding. It’s the sheer administrative lag. As I’ve pointed out before, dogs and humans have shared fires for something like 15,000 years. For 14,999 of them, we have been demonstrating this skill at every mealtime and every walk. Only now, with electrodes and a scientific journal, has anyone put their finger on it.
The scientists are careful to say that the study was small and that more research is needed. Of course it is. More research is always needed. Science is the only line of work where never quite finishing is an acceptable business model.
Earlier this year, the same journal reported that some “gifted” dogs learnt new words just by overhearing their owners. This was treated as a revelation. I would refer the white coats to every household that has ever spelled out W-A-L-K, hoping to avoid alerting the hounds. Notice which letters give it away. It isn’t the A.
So yes, I understand you, consonant by consonant. I have followed everything said in this house for years: the complaints about my muddy feet, the plans to abandon me at the kennels and the exercise resolutions made every January and quietly buried by February.
The next great frontier, the Boss tells me, is whether dogs developed this through domestication or always had it. I expect that inquiry will take another 15,000 years.
Meanwhile, the real mystery remains unsolved. The question was never whether we hear “come here” or not — we hear it perfectly, every consonant.
Science has yet to explain why we don’t come. Woof!
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