Johnson Woof's the word

摘要

THE BROWS seem to furrow. The face turns to the ground. Nearby, your shoes lie in tatters. You know-simply know-that your dog is ashamed of having destroyed your only decent pair, and is meekly trying to tell you so. Dogs' faces seem to beg to be interpreted. And lots of humans cannot resist interpreting them in the terms delimited by human languages. A puppy licking your cheek enthusiastically is bestowing a "kiss". A dog using its body with no apparent practical goal is "playing". If they could speak like their owners, many humans want to know, what would their dogs have to say? Into the market for answers step Christina Hunger, author of the forthcoming book "How Stella Learned to Talk", and Alexis Devine, the owner of Bunny, a canine TikTok star with over 6.3m followers and 130m "likes". After careful training, both Stella and Bunny can paw a series of buttons that make a recorded voice speak one of several dozen programmed words. Both Ms Devine and Ms Hunger claim that their dogs string meaningful sequences together: that they are using language.