Two stories about what dogs can learn.
The first is about teaching word sounds to a border collie. It is, as best anyone can tell, a true story.
Dog Might Provide Clues on How Language Is Acquired
He bought Chaser as a puppy in 2004 from a local breeder and started to train her for four to five hours a day. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She was taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten.
... In three years, Chaser’s vocabulary included 800 cloth animals, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and a medley of plastic items...
... The 1,022 words in Chaser’s vocabulary are all proper nouns. Dr. Pilley also found that Chaser could be trained to recognize categories, in other words common nouns. She correctly follows the command “Fetch a Frisbee” or “Fetch a ball.” She can also learn by exclusion, as children do. If she is asked to fetch a new toy with a word she does not know, she will pick it out from ones that are familiar...
The second story is from The Awl (via Brad DeLong)...
It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog to use an iPad.
For the last two weeks, Anna has been spending more time than usual with José de Sousa Saramago, the Portuguese water dog she named after her favorite writer...
Anna takes José Saramago’s paw in her hands and whispers in his ear. He taps the iPad and the web browser opens. José Saramago gives a little yelp.
“It’s entirely conceivable that a dog could learn simple computer functions,” says Dr. Walker Brown, the director of the Center for Canine Cognition, a research facility in Maryland. “Word processing, e-mailing, even surfing the web: for many dogs, the future is already here”...
Alas, the second story is a parody. It is fiction. After reading the first story though ...
Given enough time, patience, and interest a dog can learn the rudiments of language. It goes slowly. It takes insane persistence (Is Pilley Aspergerish?), but one word a day adds up over time. I'm sure someone, somewhere, is now training their dog to use an iPad. They will make the Awl story partly true (maybe not the word processing though).
There are lessons for those of us who work with special needs children ... teens ... and adults.
My eldest's verbal processing tests at the pre-primer level. He reads at somewhere between third and fourth grade. And yet, he does truly remarkable things with his iPhone. He continues to learn. HIs learning is slow, but faster than Chaser. Alas, he's not as keen -- unless one were to count the increasingly sophisticated iPhone games he plays.
Alas, he has only a few years of formal education left. I have some concerns, even now, about how much will be done in the next few years. "Life skills" are needed, but he is not going to stop learning at 19. I think, given time, he could read at the fifth or sixth grade level -- which starts to work him into the normal range. I suspect he'll never have strong receptive language, but he may do more with reading and writing. He already converses more effectively by text than by spoken language.
His digital skills are exceptional -- an order of magnitude better than some of his linguistic reasoning skills. There are things to work with.
Somehow I have to figure out how he will continue to be taught, and to learn, until he's at least fifty ...
