Lind, M., 2024. When Dogs Talk: Technologically Mediated Human-Dog Interactions as Semiotic Assemblages. Signs and Society, 12(1), pp.14-36.
Animals and language, and more specifically whether they use or understand language has been an evocative ethological, philosophical and linguistic question for a long time. A technology that has developed from augmentative and alternative communication devices used in speech therapy for children and people with speech-related disabilities are so-called talking buttons: large plastic buttons that play a prerecorded message when pressed. These have become increasingly popular on social media as a so called intermediary for pet and owner communication.
This study examines technologically mediated human-dog interactions and questions whether they should be labelled as language-based communication, as the marketing of these buttons suggests, or whether there are different and more accurate explanations and interpretation available.
Lind suggests that instead of understanding and accepting that dogs’ use of these buttons is them (humanly) speaking their minds, these forms of communication should rather be considered as semiotic assemblages (Pennycook 2017) in which bodies, language, and objects come together to create meaning in interaction. The picture or context as a whole is more meaningful.
How Stella learned to talk
The adaptation of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices as a way to facilitate dog-human communication was first experimented with by speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger when she and her partner got a puppy, which she describes in How Stella Learned to Talk (2021) her book on the topic.
"Augmentative and alternative communication methods used for people with communication impairments include “signing, use of symbols and voice output devices”(Baxter et al. 2012, 115). Technology for AAC is advancing rapidly and offers both high- and low-technology speech-generating solutions: low-technology options include single message or static multimessage devices that provide a prerecorded spoken output when activated (usually by push); high- technology devices usually involve more complex computer software tools (Baxter et al. 2012). Common low-technology AACs are voice-output switches such as BIGmack or Step-by-Step—large plastic buttons that hold a recording device and speaker so that users can prerecord a message that is then played when the button is pushed. Hunger adapted this AAC technology for use with her puppy Stella, first using a single button that played the word outside, training Stella to use it to communicate when she needed to go out to relieve herself. This catalysed the addition of more buttons to Stella's vocabulary."
Full details of further types of buttons, and demonstrations and uses of word strings can be found on pages 8-16 of the full paper.
Semiotic Assemblages
"Rather than showing actual language acquisition by dogs, these videos show that training dogs to use talking buttons allows both humans and dogs to find a communicative medium, or, in Weil’s words, “to find a place of intersection between [their] worlds” (2012, 11). Christina Hunger echoes this phrasing when she notes that “it felt like the two of us entered our own bubble of communication together” (2021, 165). This “place of intersection” or “bubble of communication” seems to be located somewhere between “mere” communication and “real” language: While the dogs appear to form language-like utterances by activating the buttons to play back lexical items and short phrases, the humans in these interactions both model the button use to the dogs but at the same time verbally imitate the button-based form of language use, reducing their verbal language to combinations of lexemes without syntactical structure or grammatical features like inflection or the use of auxiliaries."
What this exposes is the idea that communication is not language, we communicate in many ways that are not linguistic, and that this form of communication, through the use of buttons, demonstrates the need for human demonstration and a dogs predisposition for imitative learning.
"This is particularly interesting because human language is so often described as distinct from animal communication specifically because of its abstract features, that is, grammar and syntax (e.g., Zuberbühler 2019), which is exactly what seems to be given up first in the buttonbased communication."
We see a reversion to the type of language best associated with young infants and the loss of our complex grammar and syntactic capability.
Lind therefore argues that it is rather reductive to see these videos as evidence for canine language learning, given that it is questionable to which extent the human communication in them can be characterized as “real” language use, and so much more is evidently contributing to the cooperative meaning-making than just “language.”
Instead, they emphasize what actually happens throughout these interactions: human and dogs engaging in:
a highly multimodal, multisensorial, situated cocreation of meaning. This communication is constructed through touch, gaze, verbal utterances, movement, and gestures, as well as through verbal utterances and the use of the talking buttons.
It is this assemblage of lexical meaning, situated embodied practices, and objects that constitutes meaningful interaction based on the familiarity between the interactants in these videos.
"Talking buttons thus function as a curious “place of intersection” (Weil 2012, 11) that simultaneously appeals to human exceptionalism through anthropomorphization of the animal
other (i.e., giving dogs“real language”) while ostensibly necessitating an “animalization” on the part of humans through “delanguaging”their language in terms of
syntactic reduction and by reminding them that human languaging always is embodied practice too."