
Children Understand Dog Language - unitedacademics
http://www.ua-magazine.com/children-understand-dog-language/
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tonyarkles
The title is right, but the article is wrong. The article says that children
understand dogs much better than adults. The original paper says that children
are just-as-good as adults, which implies that we learn how to interpret those
sounds very young.

Still a very interesting result!

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brutos
I also took a look at the paper, because the topic is pretty cool. So what
they actually found:

Figure 1 in the paper shows that six and eight year olds are a lot worse than
adults, while 10 year olds are only somewhat close to adults. In this figure
they asked the participants to classify if a bark was barked in three
different context (stranger, alone, play). All age groups were able to tell
when a dog is barking at a stranger, that seems to be pretty hardwired into
our brains. The rest seems to be experience.

In figure 2 they asked the same age groups to associate different emotions to
the barks in the three contexts. Similar classification findings as in the
figure before. The authors discuss though that associating human emotions with
the dog's real "inner state" is difficult and maybe not possible.

So the content of the linked article is very misleading and suggest that the
journalist didn't really care to take a look at the paper. But the paper
itself is interesting.

It would also be fun idea for a novelty app that can tell you how your dog
feels. MVP might be to turn the data from table 1 of the paper into a very
simple classifier. The data is however only based on 8 dogs from the same
race.

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danielvf
I wonder how much this recognition effect varies by background. Where I grew
up, two out of three houses had a dog. I've never met someone from my side of
town who was scared of dogs in general. In other locations I've seen multiple
households running back inside as a dog I knew was friendly was walked by.

The kids in the sample were probably all from the same area and economic
class, and so would likely have similar backgrounds. Were the adults the usual
10 college students?

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brutos
"We tested participants in four age groups: 6 years old, 8 years old, 10 years
old and adults (over 18 years) as a control group. In each age group there
were 10 participants who had a family dog in the household and 10 who never
had one. The 6-year-old group was tested in kindergartens, the 8 and 10-year-
old groups were tested in elementary schools. The adult group was recruited
from university students. The sex ratios of each group were balanced. The mean
ages of dog-owner and non-dog-owner adults were 23.80 ± 1.33 and 24.10 ± 3.19
years, respectively."

And the dogs: "Barks from the Mudi breed (a Hungarian sheepdog listed at the
238th Standard of the FCI (Fédération Cynologique International)) were used
for this study. We recorded bark samples from eight adult individuals
(male/female: 3/5, age: 4.13 ± 2.30 years)."

Keep in mind its some ethnologists from a Hungarian university. It's not like
they will have huge funding.

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danielvf
Thanks for posting the details!

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vorg
Would appreciate "(2011)" being added to the title here. This user often
submits articles from this website, and a quick check of 2 previous articles
(both interesting) shows they never put the year (when older than this year)
in the title.

