What does a dog say?

I'm sure you all remember when you were little kids and your parents asked you a whole series of questions like "what does a dog say?", "what does a duck say?", etc. Well, Agathe Jacquillat and Tomi Vollauschek, graphic designers who met at the Royal College of Art in London while taking a post-grad course on Communication Art and Design, have taken that childhood game a step farther, possibly in another direction.

Jacquillat and Vollauschek are responsible for the delightfully intriguing and addictive site bzzzpeek , where they have collected voice samples of children from around the world responding to questions like "what does a dog say?". The best thing about this is that their responses are only occasionally "woof woof". Russian dogs say "guff guff", Japanese dogs say "wua wua", and goodness knows what Korean dogs say. Korean onomatopoeia tends to be the strangest for American English listeners.

All this serves to bring home a point that I haven't made yet, one that is often overlooked in Cognitive Science; language is not just for communicating, it's also for perceiving. It's fair to assume that Russian dogs bark like American dogs (they have the same vocal apparatus), so it must not be that American dogs make "woof woof" sounds any more than Russian dogs make "guff guff" sounds. Rather, where American speakers hear "woof woof", Russian speakers hear "guff guff". The language(s) we speak influence what we are able to hear (and communicate). For more on this topic, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Karen Mattock.

I really appreciate this sort of work because it marries principles of good design (simple intuitive complexity) with novel, unpretentious human-sized science.

a closer look

Eyes are important. Not only are they the primary portal through which we perceive the world (~30% of cortex is involved in vision), the eyes can reveal the interests and intentions of others. It's no mistake that the eye has been referred to as "the window to the soul" since Biblical times.

The other day my professor made the point that eye-contact is not a property of the individual. Eye-contact emerges from interactions between individuals. A little bit of close observation reveals that eye-contact is not just a social phenomenon; it's also a powerful social tool.

Have you ever tried to catch someones eye? Or how about in movies, when lovers/enemies lock eyes before they kiss/fight? Or when a tour guide advises you "not to make eye-contact" with vendors in a foreign country?

When someone is lying they are often shifty-eyed and we look askance at them. According to Dictionary.com, to 'look askance' at someone is to "disapprove", while 'askance' simply means "sideways or obliquely". We show our disapproval by withdrawing access to eye-contact.

Eye-contact in humans is fun, but it has also proved to be an interesting tool for analyzing the interactions of non-human primates. Dr. Christine Johnson (UCSD) has been studying a triad (group of three) of bonobos (monkeys, above.) at the San Diego Zoo. They don't talk and there is no way to 'look inside' of their heads to see what their thinking, but they are obviously social and cognitive. So Dr. Johnson decided to code her data for "brightness", the degree to which each bonobo is facing the others (i.e. access to eye-contact). Her data reveal that access to eye-contact ("brightness") in the group is reliably correlated with patterns in their social interactions.

While I'm not really doing justice to the topic of eye-contact, or even to Dr. Johnsons research, for that matter, I hope you see what I mean.

Define "You"

I've been working in a lab that is interested in deixis, among other things. Deixis is, essentially, context-dependent linguistic reference. So any word that would be entirely ambiguous out of context, like 'now', 'then', 'this', 'that', 'it', 'there', 'me' and 'you' are all deictics.

These words (or rather, how people use these words) are interesting because

a) the speaker must take a personal perspective to use them (if you are 'there', I must be 'here'), and
b) they are used to talk about people, places, and things (both present and absent, concrete and abstract) in terms of how the speaker conceives of them,
c) they are unintelligible to non-humans (though several animal species, notably chimps, are capable of recognizing themselves, abstract symbolic reference is out of their reach), as illustrated below.

PS - Thanks for the cartoon, Dr. Creel!