118: Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales
Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? What about the studies trying to teach bonobos and other primates to communicate through buttons or signs? What have we learned about whale communication from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how people use technology to try and enhance our communications with bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales. (Sorry, other animals, you'll need to wait for a future episode.) We talk about the crucial distinction in animal communication studies between "any communication at all" (yes) and "language the way humans do it" (no), how we can actually learn more by appreciating animal communication systems on their own terms, and how some kinds of tech are helping us do that. We also talk about the logistics of studying animal communication, including avoiding the Clever Hans effect, how ubiquitous recording technology has changed the game on whalesong in recent decades (but there's still lots of catching up to do), and an at-home study of over 10,000 dogs using buttons (they're still recruiting if you want to join!).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Gretchen was invited to narrate the audiobook for Shakespeare's Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by friend of the podcast Zach Weinersmith, and we have some free copies to give away to patrons! Follow us at any level on Patreon (including free) to read the behind-the-scenes post about reading the sonnets and get the audiobook.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is... about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels. Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic, and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes, and see new projects before they're public. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals'
'Can we talk to the animals? The ethics of using machine learning to decode animal communication' by Marriah Alcantara and Kristin Andrews
Wikipedia entry for Kanzi
Wikipedia entry for Yerkish
Koko the gorilla Birkin bag post, by Tom Walker on Bluesky
'Can our pets really say ‘I love you’? Science is finding out' by Robyn Schelenz
Sign yourself and your pet up for citizen science with the Comparative Cognition Lab
'Soundboard-using pets? Introducing a new global citizen science approach to interspecies communication' by Amalia P. M. Bastos and Federico Rossano
'Washington Post article on "button dogs": Can dogs talk by pressing buttons? What science says about the debate.' from the r/Dogtraining subreddit
Wikipedia entry for Clever Hans
'This video captures a rarely seen sperm whale birth. It’s beautiful.' By Allie Yang
'Underwater Sounds heard from Sperm Whales' by L. V. Worthington and William E . Schevill
Project CETI (named after SETI)
'Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity' by Alaa Maalouf et al.
'Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events' by Aluma, Y., Baron, Z., Barrett, R. et al.
'WhAM: Towards A Translative Model of Sperm Whale Vocalization' by O. Paradise, P. Muralikrishnan, L. Chen, H. Flores García, B. Pardo, R. Diamant, D. F. Gruber, S. Gero, S. Goldwasser
Lingthusiasm episode 'Making speech visible with spectrograms'
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
