Why is it animals are unable to fully understand our languages, especially in cases where animals are house pets that hear us speak everyday?

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Go easy on me please

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Good answers throughout, but I think one thing is important to note– we’re not good at understanding language because we’re intelligent per se, we’re good at understanding language because we have dedicated neural hardware for understanding language. Put your hand on your temple. Right under your skull there is a piece of brain called Wernicke’s Area. Damage to Wernicke’s Area will cause people to be utterly unable to comprehend language, but will leave all other aspects of their cognition intact. What does this mean? It means that I take a bit of issue with this idea that humans understand language because we’re *smart.* Are birds more athletic than us because they can fly? Not really, since we’re physically not equipped to complete. Similarly, it looks like animals just *don’t have the hardware* to understand language.

That said, let’s think a little. Dogs can obviously understand words, or even phrases. Most animals can associate sounds with results. I can train an animal to do task A when they hear sound A, and task B when they hear sound B. Why are words so hard? What’s really the difference between “Sit” and “Hey, can you get off the sofa?”

Well, it turns out that words are *hard* to understand. Most people speak pretty fast, but your tongue and mouth can only move so fast to get into position for the next sound. So that means that you need to adjust the sounds you make in anticipation of what sound needs to be made next (you do this subconsciously, of course). This means that production of one speech sound will overlap the production of another sound in time. This overlap is called coarticulation by academics. Coarticulation doesn’t stop YOU from understanding language, but it’s certainly a difficult task a brain to solve. The very fact that it isn’t a problem for YOU is a testament to how well your brain has done to solve it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you need THIS explained I’m guessing there’s a few other things too…?;)

Anonymous 0 Comments

The average cat or dog has the brain capacity of a human two year old. The most they can achieve is memorizing a few words by association. An entire sentence is far too much for them to compute.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The same reason you can’t differentiate dogs by smell of follow an hours old trail through the woods like your dog can. You are a human, uniquely specialized with a giant brain. The giant brain and the large fraction of the brain used for vision and language is way more brain than any other animal uses. We’re the freaks here. The dog has a big chunk of their brain allocated for smell, that’s how we can train them to smell things smugglers are working hard to hide.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically, humans have really big brains with a section dedicated to understanding language. Other animals don’t have brains that are that big or capable of doing complicated thoughts. Language is something their brains just can’t grasp. It’s sort of like asking a baby to program a computer. It’s just too hard for them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

While dogs do not understand languages, they do understand words. That’s why you can teach them a command – they are able to associate a particular sound with something you’ve taught them (like sit, shake, roll over, etc).

As for why? I’d say it’s just not in their brain. Human brains are more adept to language by a long shot compared to animals.