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Transcript Episode 118: Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about using technology to communicate with animals – and how we could know if animals are using language? But first, we have a special treat for you on Patreon.

Gretchen: A while back, I got asked to read the audio book for Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith, which was a very fun day in a recording studio reading these classic sonnets distilled down into very silly rhyming couplets.

Lauren: It’s impressive how Zach managed to write something that was both so elegant but also funny. Gretchen’s delivery is excellent.

Gretchen: Zach has very kindly given us some free copies of this audio book for patrons to download.

Lauren: This is available for all patrons both free and paid. Even if you haven’t checked us out on Patreon, we’ve been posting more and more fun stuff there for all levels of patronage.

Gretchen: Including our very first bonus episode about swearing, which we refreshed with some new, swear-y information. It’s also free for all patrons.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode over at Patreon includes some extra content from two excellent, recent interviews. One is a discussion with Danny Bate about learning Czech and living in Czechia. We also returned to the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern, who has a very cool undergraduate university class about it.

Gretchen: To listen to this bonus feature as well as over 100 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, do you feel like people ask you a lot to adjudicate on specific examples of animal communication and whether or not they are truly language? Because this happens to me all the time.

Lauren: Oh, yes, and I’m always so happy to have this conversation with people because it’s always so interesting what animals and what theories about communication come up in these stories. I love hearing about all the different ways different animals communicate.

Gretchen: I think that it’s useful to be descriptive about what we mean and try to be very precise about what we mean here because I wanna distinguish between two things. One is any type of communication. And the second is specifically what linguists mean when we talk about language. Because sometimes the word “language” gets used informally to refer to any type of communication at large.

Lauren: Weirdly enough, linguists have a really specific idea of a specific bundle of features used in a specific way that is only found among humans across modalities.

Gretchen: So, the question of “Can animals communicate? Can they communicate with each other? Can they sometimes communicate with us as humans or with other species of animals?” – the answer to that is absolutely. They can communicate some ways and some things. Have we yet found an animal that uses a communication system in the same ways that human communication systems do that all human languages have in common whether they’re spoken, whether they’re signed, whether they’re tactile? That we haven’t. All of the human things, regardless of how related to each other they are, regardless of whether they have a writing system or not, they seem to have something in common that, so far, we haven’t found any animals or aliens that do all of those things.

Lauren: Figuring out the specific thing that that communication is is interesting in itself. But also, what if we reboot Dr. Dolittle in a really tech savvy way, like, can we bridge some of that gap? Is it just because they don’t have the same face shape as us to make the same sounds or the same focus on making signs with hands and bodies – can we use technology to see if this really is a level playing field or not?

Gretchen: I saw the Dr. Dolittle movie back when it came out. I confess to having that dream. Like, what if we really could someday communicate with animals? I think that the quest for it has led in some interesting directions, even if (spoiler) we’re gonna find out at the end that they’re not quite the same (so far) as what humans are doing.

Lauren: Now, we are not going to – even though we are called to adjudicate on a wide range of animal communication stories today – Gretchen, we are not going to arbitrate every single animal communication story. We’ve already done an episode where we look at horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, dogs, other animals. Today, we’re just gonna look at a few case studies in particular.

Gretchen: So that we can go into them each in enough depth, and also so we can maybe preserve some material for future episodes. We’re gonna talk about three animals – bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales.

Lauren: Okay. We’ve all had a chance, hopefully, to interact with at least one of these animals.

Gretchen: I have definitely interacted with at least one of dogs, bonobos, and sperm whales.

Lauren: I am here to tell you all about a very particular bonobo called Kanzi, who I – recently reading a textbook he was described as a “bonobo celebrity.”

Gretchen: He’s certainly the only bonobo I know by name.

Lauren: He was a male bonobo. He lived from 1980 to 2025, so a cusp-y Gen X-Millennial.

Gretchen: I feel like he was really very famous when I was first getting into linguistics. I read a number of pop linguistic treatments of Kanzi. I’m curious to know how well they stack up.

Lauren: What makes him so compelling is that he wasn’t intended to be one of the bonobos that they trained to use human-mediated communication to talk to humans. He was just hanging out with his adoptive mom Matata when he was really young where she would be being taught this communication system, and he just started using it. Really from an early age giving the sense that he’s doing what human children do, which is just acquiring from the environment how to use language.

Gretchen: Because there was a whole fad, which has kind of faded now (maybe because it didn’t turn out quite as well as people were hoping) of trying to teach various kinds of apes – you know, Koko the gorilla is famous among this series as well –

Lauren: Another celebrity primate, absolutely.

Gretchen: – various celebrity primates to try to communicate in various systems. Since great apes don’t have the same type of vocal tract as humans do, they can’t shape humans sounds, but their hands can do many of the things that human hands can do. There were attempts to teach them sign languages. They were attempts to teach them to communicate with symbolic boards as well.

Lauren: And Kanzi used a combo of these. I definitely agree. He’s at the end of this trend that started in the mid-20th Century. He’s probably the peak and the end of this research being driven where we force primates to communicate on our terms. He used some signs that were adapted from ASL, but he also used these symbols on a board called “lexigrams.” These he would learn the symbol, and it would be sometimes attached to a synthetic voice so that he could press the button, and it would vocalise the word that was attached to that symbol. I actually have a lexigram for you to look at here.

Gretchen: Ooo, yeah.

Lauren: And a screenshot of the board. I chose an aesthetic one.

Gretchen: Yeah, let me see if I can figure out what it might mean or describe what it does.

Lauren: Sure. You describe what it looks like and then have a go.

Gretchen: I’m seeing a symbol that’s a circle with a straight vertical line going all the way through and spilling out at the edges and then horizontally through the circle there’s sort of a wave, like maybe a sine wave or something similar to that that goes through horizontally along the middle. If I had to guess, I would say maybe they want this to indicate – well, it looks kind of like a Pokéball, but that’s probably not what they wanted the bonobo to communicate. Maybe that’s a speech wave or a thought wave?

Lauren: This is the lexigram for “juice.”

Gretchen: Juice? Oh. It doesn’t look like the juice emoji at all.

Lauren: No. Like human language, it’s pretty arbitrary in the relationship between form and meaning. There is some structure to this set of symbols. Red is for things like food and drink. Blue is for activities. Purple is for animate beings like humans and bonobos.

Gretchen: Who even knows if bonobos have the same ontology that humans have. The colour system is helping the humans, but do we know that they distinguish between actions and foods or something in that systematic way?

Lauren: But this juice, like all the best lexigrams, looks like a really great album cover.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, yeah. This could definitely be some sort of Total Eclipse of the Heart situation, especially from the era.

Lauren: This particular set of visual communication that was designed to be used with primates like Kanzi is known as “Yerkish.” I didn’t realise it had a name until I did this research. It’s named after Robert M. Yerkes, who founded the lab where Kanzi spent his time.

Gretchen: Well, I guess it makes sense that Yerkish should be named after a guy named Yerkes. I was hoping for a more exciting etymology, but okay, yeah.

Lauren: “Yerkish” sounds way more metal than it looks as a set of images.

Gretchen: How did Kanzi do at using these symbols? It was sort of a press-a-button-and-play-a-sound symbol, but the buttons were visually identifiable.

Lauren: I mean, I think the challenge with the research on Kanzi, as with many of these primates, is there’s only one of him (so only a finite number of people can work with him). That work is labour. He needs to rest. There’s a finite amount of research; there’s a finite number of people who can do that research. A lot of the debate has been around how much is it people scaffolding him into communicating the way they want him to even if it’s not consciously, how much of it is people who are communicating with him kind of projecting their own desired outcome on the communication. This has been a problem with a lot of this 20th Century primates-who-sign, primates-who-use-symbols type of communication. It does seem like he had a pretty good understanding of these 350 Yerkish symbols and supposedly could understand many spoken English words. Based on trial, apparently, he could identify symbols correctly like 89-95% of the time. That is very cool.

Gretchen: That’s like you show him an apple, and he presses the symbol for “apple.”

Lauren: Yeah, there did seem to be some, like, he could combine them to make slightly more complicated meanings, but there didn’t appear to be any evidence of the kind of grammatical structure – like all those little, small words that we have in English that do all the grammatical heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Words like “and” and “of” and “the” or endings like “-ing” and “-ed” and plural and stuff like that. All languages have something like this whether they do it as short, individual words or whether they do it as prefixes and suffixes. Languages have grammar. That’s one of things we’ve found in all the human languages we’ve encountered. It’s something that we don’t find in the bonobos.

Lauren: I really, really need to stress this point, just so we have a reason to read one of my favourite Bluesky posts ever.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: This is an entirely fictional, not true account of Koko the gorilla and a researcher.

Gretchen: This is Koko fanfiction. It’s not a real thing.

Lauren: This is Koko fanfiction, but it captures what it feels like to read this research where you have these primates communicating without function words and researchers attempting to create a translatable structure out of it.

Gretchen: Shall we each take a part?

Lauren: I’m happy to take Koko because I put this upon us. “Koko – Birkin bag – practical Koko possession bag.”

Gretchen: Then the researcher says, “No, Koko, you can’t have a Birkin bag.”

Lauren: “Good Birkin. Good Koko. Give beautiful Koko deserve gorilla.”

Gretchen: “Koko, we simply can’t afford a Birkin bag. It is an unjustifiable expense.”

Lauren: “Jealousy professor.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: This one gets me every time.

Lauren: Every time. That’s what it feels like, genuinely, to read this research and what it feels like to see this gap between chimp communication and human full grammatical function.

Gretchen: Even this is something that has been constructed to have what a human sees as a punchline. Either the snippets that we get repeated for us have been excerpted from a larger context in which maybe the gorilla goes on – or the bonobo or whatever – goes on to say something else that makes it less punchline-y, or the human has put in some sort of narrative to, again, give it more actual structure than what the whole dataset of what the great ape is trying to communicate.

Lauren: But also, just to stress, that was an entirely fictional account. What I think is really exciting is – we’ve seen this dwindling of this particular kind of research, and what we’re seeing instead is this really exciting growth of research where we’re seeing primates and great apes all researched on their own communicative terms rather than forcing them to communicate with humans or through human technology. There’s lots of work from great researchers like Cat Hobaiter where the researchers spend lots of time, they collect lots of video footage that they can then get independent verification to see how apes communicate with each other. That’s showing some really interesting properties that seem to be this core set of gesture that exist across gorillas and across apes and across potentially one of the substructures that then went on to contribute to human language.

Gretchen: That’s really neat because I feel like I’ve also used gesture to communicate with humans and sometimes, you know, with dogs and other species, when I don’t share a language in common with them. There’re some gestures like, “I’m not being threatening right now,” or “I’m happy,” or this kind of thing that can cross communication barriers. Maybe that’s something we can also share to some extent with our cousins the great apes.

Lauren: There’s some great projects they’ve done where they’ve collected citizen science like, “What do you think this gesture means?” type feedback from humans who are just watching these video interactions. As a human, though, you’re always gesturing with the knowledge that this other human has a language. You might be stacking gestures together in a way that presumes language. What I find really interesting about chimp communication – there was this great paper where they observed some multi-gesture structures –

Gretchen: Ooo, that sounds so sophisticated!

Lauren: These weren’t the sophisticated chimps. These were younger chimps who hadn’t learnt yet what was the most effective way to communicate. It’s a good plot twist.

Gretchen: Plot twist: the chimp gestures share some features of human gestures, and we could maybe guess what they mean at a rate higher than chance, but then they’re not doing that human thing of doing sequences, which is what we really see in human language.

Lauren: Yeah, they’re just like, younger chimps are figuring out what’s gonna work, and the older chimps are like, “Here’s how you do it.” Nice and efficient.

Gretchen: Here’s the one gesture you need.

Lauren: This is why I think it’s really exciting to not force them into our technology and our attempts for what makes communication.

Gretchen: The next animal that we wanna talk about is dogs. I think dogs have a really interesting connection with the chimp research and the gorilla research and the great ape research because, on the one hand, we can’t teach dogs to sign because they don’t have opposable thumbs for it, but they are already found in so many human homes and have a whole lot of evolutionary practice at understanding and being understood by humans even with very different anatomy. But there have recently been a couple famous button dogs on social media who –

Lauren: Button dogs?

Gretchen: Ah, their humans post these videos of the dogs pressing buttons with their paws or their noses that speak words out loud, and then the human ends up telling a story or attributing something to the dog’s intentionality about pressing these buttons.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: These buttons were first developed for humans who have language disorders like aphasia. They can press these buttons in order to communicate.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, assisted communication is absolutely a valid communication tool that humans can use.

Gretchen: Exactly. When humans use it, we us it in ways that are structured, that are complex, that use things like function words and question words, and that use the full end of the spectrum. Often, an assisted communication tool will have both some buttons for frequent words but also a way to type in extra words that weren’t in the system to give humans that sort of open-endedness to communicate their thoughts. The dog system’s generally much simpler. They have just a few buttons. They may be larger for the dog to be able to press them. They record a voice of the human saying a word. A few of the famous dogs are Bunny, who is a sheepadoodle –

Lauren: Great dog name.

Gretchen: Yeah. And Stella, who is another –

Lauren: Classic dog name.

Gretchen: There are a lot of these dogs at this point. Apologies if we don’t cite your favourite. One such example is a female labrador named Copper, who has a video that’s titled “Cool…Mad” and presents this story about, apparently, the dog being upset about losing access to the pool. It opens with a shot of the dog calmly sitting there. The trainer’s voice says, “Hey, Cop, what do you want?” The dog sluggishly presses the pool button. The trainer responds, “I know. Your pool is broken. I’m so sorry.” The trainer asks, “Copper want to play?” The dog presses the “Mad” button, then looks away from the camera.

Lauren: This dog has impeccable comedic timing.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a paper that analyses some of this communication, which we’re gonna link to. There’s a few things there that are a little bit suspicious if you know dogs, one of which is that the – we know what an angry dog looks like, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: An angry dog is growling. Their hackles are up. All this sort of stuff. The dog presses this “Mad” button, but otherwise, the dog has a steady posture, slow movements, that don’t covey a sense of anger or agitation. So, pressing the “Mad” button is great comedic timing from a human perspective but doesn’t necessarily follow that the dog is communicating even something we know dogs can communicate like, “I’m angry,” or “I’m agitated,” or “I’m upset.” If you have a dog or you’re familiar with dogs, you know that a dog can communicate like, “Back off, I’m annoyed,” and that’s not quite what’s happening here?

Lauren: So, what is happening?

Gretchen: What seems to be happening is that humans love to tell a story.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: And that our impression of what the dog’s communicating is being shaped by both the human who’s behind the camera and then also the human who’s choosing how to edit and post these videos. Not just specifically for this one video but probably for the videos in general, we don’t know how many videos get recorded that don’t have a funny comedic thing happening at the end that make them worth posting. You can train pigeons to hit buttons.

Lauren: Yeah? Tell me more.

Gretchen: And you have a left button and a right button, right. You can train pigeons to do certain types of combinations of left-right-left-right or even you have to only reward left and right patterns of pecks that had not occurred in some previous number of opportunities. So, the pigeons might only be rewarded, get a little bit of food, if the pattern of responses have not been seen in the last five peck sequences. They’re able to do that. They can produce these variable patterns.

Lauren: Okay. What you’re saying is I could get a pigeon to reply to my text messages for me.

Gretchen: Well, maybe. If you give a pigeon a bunch of buttons that say a bunch of English words, and they press them in a whole bunch of random orders because you’re encouraging them to do lots of different orders, one of those, which could be the only video you put on TikTok, might say, “Hey, Gretchen, I don’t wanna record today. I’m mad.” If you give the pigeon the right number of buttons, and you get – it’s the million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare sort of thing. You can eventually get something that looks like a sentence.

Lauren: But it’s also because humans love to read meaning into human symbols. We’re not asking the dog to design this. It’s all human words.

Gretchen: In some ways, I think of the buttons as less of a prosthetic device for the animals and more a prosthetic device for the humans because humans love to interpret language. It’s pretty well-known that you can teach a dog to ring a bell – maybe for a certain cue. I’ve known dogs who had learned to ring a bell when they wanted to go outside to go to the potty kind of thing. You can teach a dog to do that. A dog can communicate with dog body language that they wanna play or that they’re tired or that they want some food or water. They can go over to their food bowl and make some plaintive eyes at you. If you teach them to press a button to communicate the same thing, they can.

Lauren: Again, linguists are never disputing that dogs are communicating with humans. We’re doing some kind of communication. We’re just very fussy about when that crosses over into language. If ringing a bell and pressing a button that says, “Release me from my torment,” does the same thing, that’s probably not language.

Gretchen: Right. I think that at this point there is quite a bit of scepticism. I really enjoyed some of the comments on the dog training subreddit about this type of research because I think people who know dogs are pretty aware of what dogs can and can’t communicate. People were saying, okay, it’s useful for these types of things, like “I wanna go out,” “I want some food,” this kind of thing, but there’s a lot of scepticism on this thread (there’s a lot of scepticism, I think, in general) that the dog is really communicating, like, “I’m mad about the pool being closed,” or “Why is this thing happening,” or these more complicated questions that we don’t necessarily think dogs can really put sequences together in complex sorts of ways.

Lauren: Also, dogs have so many communication skills. Their ability to follow human gaze and use gaze to direct humans is something that is not found among other canines. It’s actually a weirdly complicated skill to know that if someone extends their hand or extends a finger, you don’t look at that – I’m so obsessed with pointing and this imaginary line that we project out into the world.

Gretchen: The fact that we can do the fake out fetch with the dogs where you pretend to throw the object, and you don’t throw it, and the dog is trying to go there and then is confused when it’s not there – that’s very advanced that dogs can follow our movement to try to end up at a trajectory. That’s something to really appreciate about dogs in their own terms.

Lauren: When you break down communication into all these different skills, and you can be like, there’s this thing – we really struggle to get gorillas and chimpanzees to engage with pointing. They are in our genetic lineage, and they can’t do this thing that dogs can do that is unique within their genetic lineage. Putting together this more complicated puzzle tells a more interesting story.

Gretchen: The thing about the buttons is, again, some of the dog trainer comments were like, “I tried to use the buttons, but I found that it was better for me to just pay attention to the dog’s actual body language because when I was paying too much attention to the buttons, I was ignoring the ways the dog was already communicating with me.” The buttons tend to be quite large. They stay at home. If you’re taking the dog to the park or all of the other many places you can take the dog, they don’t necessarily have the buttons. At that point, you’re still trying to communicate with their body language, their whimpers, their howls, their barks, all of the ways that dogs do communicate with us. Many dogs have learned how to understand certain human words like, “Hey, do you wanna go for a walk?”

Lauren: Gretchen, that’s very mean to people who are maybe listening with their dogs present.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I’m sorry if I just trolled you dog. But one of the cool things about how ubiquitous dogs are and how these buttons have become really popular is that there’s a citizen science dog communication project that has enrolled over 10,000 dogs and –

Lauren: Ten thousand?

Gretchen: Yeah! And seven hundred cats from 47 countries across every continent except Antarctica. You can still sign up for it. It’s still running. They have been trying to figure out how these buttons are being used, what processes people use to try to train their dogs to use them, and can you put the dogs through some tasks with the researchers on the camera to monitor how they’re doing them. So far, they don’t have a ton of results yet. They do try to find, you know, “Do the dogs have any language strings?”

Lauren: That’s putting together multiple buttons to potentially communicate something more complicated.

Gretchen: Right. One dog had apparently being pressing “water” and “bone” in a sequence to request ice –

Lauren: Oh, that’s very cute.

Gretchen: – up until the owner acquired an “ice” button, and the dog abandoned this phrase. That’s kind of cute. Again, I wonder how much of this is prosthetic technology for the humans, right, because if the humans use “water bone,” even if the dog has just done that arbitrarily, and rewards the dog with “Oh yeah, here’s some ice, you like ice,” and then the next time the dog is like, “Oh, maybe I press Button 1 and Button 3 to request ice even if they don’t have an actual understanding of the meaning of those buttons in a combinatorial way.

Lauren: I guess the idea of having the multiple cameras and having the researchers join for some of the interaction is to avoid one of my favourite phenomena in human-animal communication, which is the Clever Hans effect. Clever Hans was a horse in Germany in the early 1900s. In fact, I’ve never thought about this before, but of course, he was German, so his name wasn’t “Clever Hans” it was “Der Kluge Hans.” Hans drew massive crowds for solving mathematical puzzles by beating his hoof on the ground for the correct answer. He could do all kinds of operations. Very clever horse. Except, this researcher, Oskar Pfungst, figured out that what was happening is that his trainer and other people subconsciously were letting Hans know when he should stop tapping. They were like, all leaning in, and then when he got up to the number of hoof beats, they’d all step back and subtly let him know to stop tapping. They didn’t even realise they were doing this.

Gretchen: So, not like, obviously leaning in and out, but they would just sort of relax a little bit.

Lauren: Whatever subtle cues – this horse wasn’t a maths genius. It was a human body language genius.

Gretchen: Which is itself kind of interesting, right?

Lauren: In itself an amazing skill.

Gretchen: Because horses have also co-evolved with humans to be able to interpret what we’re doing with our eye gaze and our posture and the rest of our bodies. It’s just not quite the same as being able to do long division.

Lauren: And so, this was such a scandal. Hans was such a celebrity that this has become known as the “Clever Hans effect” when you are giving an animal or a research participant in general (human animal or non-human animal) – you’re giving them some kind of subtle indicator of whether they are performing the experiment correctly.

Gretchen: The kind of thing you wanna do to prevent that is ask the question from behind a screen, maybe, where the horse or the dog or whatever can’t see you, or ask a question that neither the asker nor anyone in the room knows the answer to. Because otherwise we know dogs can track our eye gaze. If we’re looking at the button that would be the funniest punchline to what the dog could be quote-unquote “saying,” they could be following that eye gaze and being like, “Well, my human really likes it when I press this button. I’m gonna do that because I like to please my human.”

Lauren: Which is why it’s so great they’re doing this big citizen science project.

Gretchen: Yeah. What they’ve learned so far is that “now” is a favourite dog word, whereas owners generally preferred “later.” It’s not simply that whichever buttons the owner presses more frequently are also gonna be pressed more frequently by the dogs.

Lauren: That’s nifty.

Gretchen: But also, this is a real sick burn – dogs communicate “love” to their owners far less frequently than their owners do to them.

Lauren: Aw, poor dog owners.

Gretchen: Which I don’t necessarily think means your dog doesn’t love you! I think it means that maybe the abstract concept of love as expressed by a button is less well-communicated by a dog than the dog wanting to come sit by you and all these other ways that dogs express being excited to see you and these types of things.

Lauren: Again, I think your observation that it’s probably better to communicate on the dog’s terms is really gonna pay off on that one.

Gretchen: Yeah. They have been trying a few more complicated controlled experimental tests. A researcher wearing noise-cancelling headphones presses a button on the dog’s sound board, which is covered by a plain coloured sticker, so the researcher doesn’t know what one they’re pressing, and that allows the dog a full minute to respond to the press. The researcher provides no feedback. The owners say a word or press a button on the dog sound board while wearing sunglasses, so you can’t see the eye gaze.

Lauren: Scientifically rigorous and very cool.

Gretchen: We should show things like dogs being more likely to move toward the door after the “outside” button is pressed than when the “food” button is pressed. Something like that, right. But they’re still working on actually getting those results. There’s another trial that they’re doing where there’s literally 24/7 cameras at multiple angles in the house facing the dog communication board at a bunch of other angles. I don’t know who’s willing to wire up their whole house to be live-streaming data to researchers on the internet, but like, thanks for contributing to science. And then the next study they’re trying to investigate is whether dogs can generalise an action label. If they have a button that says, “Help,” or something like “help” that they’ve observed in situations like the owner retrieving a ball that rolled under the couch, would they also produce that button when they’re faced with a locked food container, which is a novel context that could still require help.

Lauren: Again, this more sophisticated trying to see if they can do something closer to human language around generalisation.

Gretchen: Right, which might not necessarily mean that they have a symbolic meaning attached to “help,” but at least that they can generalise it across certain types of contexts. It’s certainly way more data than you can get off trying to do with chimpanzees, and maybe we’ll learn a few things.

Lauren: Our final animal – there’s no button boards; there’s no symbols. We’re gonna look at sperm whales as our third example where instead of us giving them a technological medium to communicate with, we are using our technology to understand how sperm whales are communicating with each other, which we don’t know a lot about. In fact, it was only in 1957 we learnt that sperm whales even made sound.

Gretchen: Oh, whoa, that’s so recent!

Lauren: The first report in Nature –

Gretchen: That’s less a hundred years ago that we even knew that they made the whale songs. I thought we’ve always known about whale songs.

Lauren: We’ve known about whale songs, but sperm whales in particular, in 1957, there’s this Nature report where they’re like, “Oh, well, this makes sense of urban-legend type stories,” but they were like, “Oh, we spent an hour hanging out near five sperm whales. At first, we thought there was some kind of problem on the ship. But once we figured that out, the whales were in plain sight. There was just this sound like a grating groan or like a hammering sound as well.” They were like, “Unfortunately, phonographic equipment was not available.” This is 1957, guys. What, do you think we carry sound equipment all the time?

Gretchen: [Laughs] So, instead, they had this description of like, “It reminded some of a rusty hinge creaking.”

Lauren: They had to go very poetic to capture it in the absence of a recording.

Gretchen: But now we have recordings.

Lauren: We do have recordings of their sequences of clicks, which are called “codas.” A lot of very interesting work is currently being done by a team with a project that is called Project CETI (C-E-T-I).

Gretchen: This reminds me of a different project SETI (S-E-T-I), which is about extraterrestrial intelligence searching.

Lauren: Yes, SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. These folk have made a great pun. They’ve called it CETI as in “cetacean,” which is the family that sperm whales are in. They refer to themselves as doing “intra-terrestrial” research.

Gretchen: What have we found? What sort of technology are we using?

Lauren: We’ve found so far that we need to invest a lot in waterproof robotics and drones and high-quality waterproof microphones.

Gretchen: That sounds useful, yes.

Lauren: A lot of their early work has just been literally developing their field kit to capture video and audio recordings of sperm whale communication and interaction. They refer to it a lot as “communication,” which I think is correct.

Gretchen: I really respect that choice.

Lauren: They do occasionally talk about “translating,” and I’m just like, oof, I think, you know, you got to do what the funding dollars call you to do, but I don’t think we’re really gonna translate, but we might learn something about the structure of whale communication.

Gretchen: I didn’t realise before we started looking into it for this episode how very behind we are in terms of understanding whales compared to understanding more accessible animals like birds and even chimps and dogs where we have many more centuries of awareness of the kinds of communication that they’re doing.

Lauren: Right. One of the big studies this team has done is that they recorded a birth within one of the sperm whale pods that they research. There were 11 members of this pod of sperm whales who were present and participated in the birth.

Gretchen: That’s so cool. Even if they aren’t necessarily just the whale’s mother or even related to the whale.

Lauren: It’s the whole community that were there. And, you know, as a bit of a midwifery geek, I love a family-assisted home birth. I think that’s really beautiful. I don’t think I would record my own birth to use in research, but I’m glad these whales were able to share this moment with us.

Gretchen: We have tons of data of what human births look like at this point. As someone who’s a fan of Call the Midwife, I really wanna see the whale sequel that’s maybe called Call of the Midwife – Call of the “Mid-Whale.”

Lauren: [Laughs] So, this research has these – like all the whales line up along the same axis to support the birthing mother whale and support the baby when it comes out. Obviously, that’s all very interesting from a social dynamic perspective. We don’t really know a lot about the social dynamics of sperm whales. But what’s also really interesting is they have three-and-a-half hours of audio. They used machine learning and computational methods to help them extract 5,731 of those coda clicks, so they could analyse them.

Gretchen: That’s like clusters of clicks or sequences of clicks.

Lauren: And so, you see these changes in the rate at which these codas are produced and the structure of them across the birth. They were longer in duration during the birth. Those sequences shortened after the birth was complete.

Gretchen: Hm, it seems to be related to something.

Lauren: There’s this great homogeneity and similarity in vocal style at any point except just before and during the birth. There’s heaps of the variability that comes in at that point. We have no idea why any of this is happening but just that there is this variation, and we now have both the recording equipment and then the computer technology to analyse it is so cool.

Gretchen: And that we have the context of what’s going on because there’s video as well of what’s going on at the same time, so we can maybe map that onto something. But this is the first time we’ve witnessed a sperm whale birth in recorded form. We have one point of data, which is a very rich point of data, but we don’t have a million births or even a hundred or a thousand births to compare it with from other sperm whales. Maybe we’ll have some in the future.

Lauren: The team have also been doing this really cool work where they look at the acoustic properties of these clicks, and they use spectrograms, which we’ve met before in acoustic phonetics.

Gretchen: Well, that’s fun (because they do have sounds).

Lauren: They do have sounds. When they look at these sounds – these are very quick. You’re slowing them down. But when you slow them down, and you look at those formant bands within the spectrogram, and you read them just like you read human spectrograms, they identify what they call R and E coda clicks because they have properties more like an R vowel in English or an E vowel in English.

Gretchen: Huh, this reminds me – people also use spectrograms to analyse bird song. With birdsong we know things like, “Okay, this is a particular bird’s courtship call,” or “This is a particular bird’s warning call,” or we have certain types of categories for things. Do we know anything like this for the whales yet?

Lauren: No, we’re literally at like, “Did you know these clicks aren’t even all the same?”

Gretchen: Oh, boy, okay. We’ve got a long way to go before we even understand as much about whale song as we do about birdsong.

Lauren: There’s like, individual whales have their own unique timing. Some click faster. Some click slower. It’s not just this one homogenous thing. There is lots of variation. There’s lots of things that are clearly happening, and we are just beginning to collect enough recordings to see what that variation is. Whether we will get towards the whale acoustic model or WAM, which is their attempt to move towards something –

Gretchen: That’s a great acronym.

Lauren: So good. They want to move towards what they’re calling a “translative model” of vocalisations. Whether that will actually happen or whether the like, we’re translating whales is just a bit of funding, advertising, like, either way, the whales are doing interesting things. It’s exciting that they are finally getting data. I’m so glad that we’re starting this on the whale’s terms, and we’re not gonna make (hopefully) the same mistakes we made with primates of trying to get them to communicate on our terms.

Gretchen: There’s no plans to create giant, floatable button boards, and try to get the whales to press them with their noses – that’s not on the horizon because we’ve realised it’s better to study animals in their own terms in terms of the communication systems.

Lauren: Thankfully, yes.

Gretchen: I think that one of the things that trying to communicate with animals and use technology reminds us is all of the different kinds of relationships we can try to have and that we can really wish we were able to have when it comes to animals and trying to find ways of doing that that try to understand the animals on their own terms and treat them in ways that are ethical for what the animal actually is and how they have a relationship with humans (or don’t want a relationship with humans), while avoiding trying to make them into circus shows, like the Clever Hans effect or these things where you train the animals to just perform that they don’t really understand what they’re doing.

Lauren: Social media reels are the new circus.

Gretchen: Yeah. And creating some sort of catchy sound bite that can be shared for entertainment speaks, I think, to this desire of humans to feel like we’re not alone and that we can communicate in interesting and meaningful ways with animals, which sometimes things like recording technology can really help but also using our own senses as fellow animals can help us avoid getting distracted by the flashy technology-driven ways of communicating.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our retro-style Gavagai rabbit shirts, totes, and scarves – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistics of idioms, where things really hit the fan; a chat with Helen Zaltzman about linguistics podcasting; and some bonus deleted scenes about Czech with Danny Bate; and the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern.

Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or leave a nice review, like this one from Sandmanstoriespresents, who said, “So enjoyable. All the working parts of language that you didn’t know had names are covered on this pod. One of the best podcasts to listen to.”

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Or as the bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales have not yet managed to say – stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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