Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can Talk

Nothing in the last century has really changed that scientific opinion. (No one has ever questioned whether dogs communicate with each other, but calling it “talking” is something else.) So what are Maya and her cousins doing? It’s more appropriate to call it imitating than talking, says Gary Lucas, a visiting scholar in psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. Dogs vocalize with each other to convey emotions—and they express their emotions by varying their tones, he says. So it pays for dogs to be sensitive to different tones. Dogs are able to imitate humans as well as they do because they pick up on the differences in our tonal patterns.

Lucas likens this behavior to that of bonobos, primates that can imitate some tonal patterns, including vowel sounds, pitch changes, and rhythms, studies show. “The vocal skills of some of the dogs and cats on YouTube suggest that they might also have some selective tonal imitation skills,” he says.

What’s happening between dog and owner-turned-voice-coach is fairly straightforward, Coren says: Owner hears the dog making a sound that resembles a phrase, says the phrase back to the dog, who then repeats the sound and is rewarded with a treat. Eventually the dog learns a modified version of her original sound. As Lucas puts it, “dogs have limited vocal imitation skills, so these sounds usually need to be shaped by selective attention and social reward.”

In the Letterman video “a pug says, ‘I love you’ and it’s very cute, but the pug has no idea what it means,” Coren says. “If dogs could talk, they would tell you, ‘I’m just in it for the cookies.’”

Anthropomorphizing animals is nothing new and will never end. The over-active pattern recognition systems of our brains is both a blessing and a curse.

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