Two‐year‐old children but not domestic dogs understand communicative intentions without language, gestures, or gaze

Moore, Richard; Mueller, Bettina; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1111/desc.12206

Cited by 34 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Theoretically, any behavioral act could be communicative as long as it offers relevant information to the receiver and it is understood as intentionally produced for that purpose (Moore, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2013;Moore, Mueller, Kaminski, & Tomasello, 2015;Sperber & Wilson, 2001). However, only if the information conveyed is relevant for the receiver will the sender's message be understood.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of iconic gestures by chimpanzees and human children

Bohn

Call

Tomasello

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of iconic gestures by chimpanzees and human children

Bohn

Call

Tomasello

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Specifically, humans, from a very young age, are sensitive to ostensive cues indicating that they are addressed in the communication, have referential expectations after observing ostensive cues, and interpret ostensive-referential communication as conveying information that is relevant and generalizable [ 43 , 44 ]. Similar mechanisms are thought to be possible, to a certain degree, in non-human animals [ 38 , 40 , 44 , 45 ], including dogs [ 46 – 48 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Do Dogs Provide Information Helpfully?

Piotti

2016

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dogs are particularly skilful during communicative interactions with humans. Dogs’ abilities to use human communicative cues in cooperative contexts outcompete those of other species, and might be the result of selection pressures during domestication. Dogs also produce signals to direct the attention of humans towards outside entities, a behaviour often referred to as showing behaviour. This showing behaviour in dogs is thought to be something dogs use intentionally and referentially. However, there is currently no evidence that dogs communicate helpfully, i.e. to inform an ignorant human about a target that is of interest to the human but not to the dog. Communicating with a helpful motive is particularly interesting because it might suggest that dogs understand the human’s goals and need for information. In study 1, we assessed whether dogs would abandon an object that they find interesting in favour of an object useful for their human partner, a random novel distractor, or an empty container. Results showed that it was mainly self-interest that was driving the dogs’ behaviour. The dogs mainly directed their behaviour towards the object they had an interest in, but dogs were more persistent when showing the object relevant to the human, suggesting that to some extent they took the humans interest into account. Another possibility is that dogs’ behaviour was driven by an egocentric motivation to interact with novel targets and that the dogs’ neophila might have masked their helpful tendencies. Therefore, in study 2 the dogs had initial access to both objects, and were expected to indicate only one (relevant or distractor). The human partner interacted with the dog using vocal communication in half of the trials, and remaining silent in the other half. Dogs from both experimental groups, i.e. indicating the relevant object or indicating the distractor, established joint attention with the human. However, the human’s vocal communication and the presence of the object relevant to the human increased the persistency of showing, supporting the hypothesis that the dogs understood the objects’ relevance to the human. We propose two non-exclusive explanations. These results might suggest that informative motives could possibly underlie dogs’ showing. It is also possible that dogs might have indicated the location of the hidden object because they recognised it as the target of the human’s search. This would be consistent with taking into account the objects’ relevance, without necessarily implying that the dogs understood the human’s state of knowledge.

show abstract

“…On the subject of recognizing communicative intentions, Scott-Phillips suggests that apes should respond differentially to ostensively and nonostensively produced novel signs. However, two-year-old children do not always do this (Moore et al 2014). Since this is not because they fail to understand communicative intentions but because they understand them flexibly, analogous findings on ape subjects would need to be interpreted cautiously.…”

Section: Richard Moorementioning

confidence: 97%

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Scott‐Phillips¹

2015

Current Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language by Thomas C. Scott-PhillipsComparisons with the cognition and communication of other species have long informed discussions of the origins and evolution of human communication and language. This research has often focused on similarities and differences with the linguistic code, but more recently there has been an increased focus on the social-cognitive foundations of linguistic communication. However, exactly what these comparisons tell us is not clear because the theoretical concepts used in the animal communication literature are different from those used in the corresponding literature on human communication, specifically those used in linguistic pragmatics. In this article, I bridge the gap between these two areas and in doing so specify exactly what great ape communication tells us about the origins of human communication and language. I conclude that great ape communication probably does not share the same socialcognitive foundations as linguistic communication but that it probably does involve the use of metacognitive abilities that, once they evolved to a more sophisticated degree, were exapted for use in what is an evolutionarily novel form of communication: human ostensive communication. This in turn laid the foundations for the emergence of linguistic communication. More generally, I highlight the often-neglected importance of pragmatics for the study of language origins.The origin of human communication and language is a topic that has exercised many generations of scholars (Stam 1976). Since Darwin, an important source of data has been comparisons between linguistic communication and the communication systems of other species (Fitch 2010). A great deal of research has thus focused on the extent to which nonhuman primates' natural communication systems have the same or similar properties as human languages (e.g., Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006;Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler 1980a). More recently, it has been argued that despite these similarities, many forms of great ape communication are probably based on different cognitive mechanisms from human language, and hence that the evolutionary conclusions we can draw from comparisons with the surface form of these systems (e.g., their "syntax," "semantics," etc.) are either unclear or limited (Deacon 1997;Rendall, Owren, and Ryan 2009;Tomasello 2008;Wheeler and Fischer 2012). Consequently, the focus of much current research on great ape communication i...

show abstract

Two‐year‐old children but not domestic dogs understand communicative intentions without language, gestures, or gaze

Cited by 34 publications

References 46 publications

Comprehension of iconic gestures by chimpanzees and human children

Comprehension of iconic gestures by chimpanzees and human children

Do Dogs Provide Information Helpfully?

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About