Babies, dogs, and the riddles of word learning

It's kind of astonishing, really, that kids ever learn words. Each one poses a little riddle. Does this sound string refer to a person? A category of things? Or maybe some other feature of the blooming, buzzing world? And yet word learning happens. In fact, we now know it begins earlier in infancy than we realized. And we now know, further, that dogs (or at least some dogs) understand words as well. So how does this happen? What do babies and dogs really know about words? And how might we go about figuring this all out?

My guests today are Dr. Elika Bergelson and Dr. Claudia Fugazza. Elika is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where her lab studies how infants learn language. Claudia is a Researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, where she and her collaborators study dogs who are especially gifted word learners.

In this conversation, Elika, Claudia, and I talk about the thorny question of what it means to understand a word—and whether there are different degrees or kinds of understanding. We consider the challenges posed by different types of words—by nouns, by names, by verbs, by function words, size terms, and more. We discuss why it is that some dogs are so good at learning words, and why infants of a certain age seem to get so much better at it. We talk about learning in different contexts and situations. And we circle the question of how different word learning really is in dogs and babies.

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Without further ado, on to my interview with Claudia Fugazza and Elika Bergelson. Enjoy!

Notes

3:30 – A paper on infants' understanding of proper nouns like "Mommy."

6:00 – For our earlier audio essay on names across the animal kingdom, see here.

11:00 – For Dr. Bergelson's early study showing that 6-month-old infants already understand the meanings of some words, see here.

13:30 – For more on the "comprehension boost" in infants after age one, see Dr. Elika's paper here.

16:30 – For Dr. Fugazza and colleagues' first studies on gifted word-learning dogs, see here and here.

20:00 – See earlier studies on Rico and Chaser.

24:00 – For more on the qualitative changes that infants may undergo as they learn to learn words, see a paper by Dr. Bergelson and a colleague here.

30:00 – A study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues comparing personality profiles and playfulness of gifted word learner dogs and typical dogs.

31:30 – A recent New York Times article consoling readers that having a "dumb" (i.e., non-gifted) dog is okay.

39:30 – A study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues showing that dogs can extend labels of toys ("pull," "fetch") to new objects that are used in the same way.

43:00 – A study by Dr. Bergelson and a colleague on how broadly (or narrowly) infants apply labels like "foot" or "juice." A study by Dr. Bergelson and colleagues looking at how familiarity affects infants' understanding of words.

52:00 – For an example of a study on the so-called noun bias in early word learning, see here. For work on the (lack of) a noun bias in Tseltal infants, see here. For a sample discussion of the so-called shape bias, see here.

54:00 – For Dr. Fugazza and colleagues' work on dogs' biases toward shape or texture when generalizing about objects, see here.

57:00 – For the work by Asifa Majid (former guest!) on odor words in Jahai, see here. For the work on scent-tracking in humans, see here.

1:02:00 – On "dog-directed speech" and its consequences, see here and here. For comparisons of dog- and infant-directed speech, see here and here.

1:04:00 – For the study finding that Tseltal-speaking children learn honorific terms (which are never addressed to them), see here.

1:06:00 – For the study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues, "examining exclusion-based choice" in dogs, see here. For the study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues showing that gifted word learner dogs can learn by over-hearing labels, see here.

1:10:00 – For the study showing that children seem to request labels for objects by pointing to them, see here.

1:12:00 – For some of the first scientific studies on the use of soundboards for communication in dogs, see here and here. For our earlier episode with Dr. Federico Rossano discussing some of this research, see here.

Recommendations

'The Invention of Language by Children,' by Lila Gleitman and Elissa Newport

'Concept-based word learning in human infants,' by Jun Yin and Gergely Csibra

'Syntactic bootstrapping as a mechanism for language learning,' by Mireille Babineau et al.

The Genius Dog Challenge YouTube channel

Tile art credit: Image by Picsea via Unsplash

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.

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