10202018 How do dogs process words Earth EarthSkyht.docx

10/20/2018 How do dogs process words? | Earth | EarthSky
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How do dogs process words?

By Eleanor Imster in Earth | Human World | October 18, 2018
What’s happening in your dog’s brain when it hears you say
squirrel? New research looks at how dog’s brains react to
human words.
Eddie, one of the dogs that participated in the study, poses in
the fMRI scanner
with two of the toys used in the experiments, “Monkey” and
“Piggy.” Image via
Gregory Berns.
The 2019 lunar calendars are here! Order yours before they’re
gone. Makes a great gift.
When your dog hears the word squirrel, it might perk up or even
run to a window and look out. But, to
your dog, does the word mean, “Something is happening?” Or
does your dog picture a small, bushy-tailed
rodent?
According to a new study, dogs have at least a rudimentary
neural representation of meaning for words
they’ve been taught and can differentiate words they’ve heard
before from those they have not.
The study, published October 15, 2018, in the peer-reviewed
journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, used brain

imaging to probe how dogs process words they have been taught
to associate with objects.
Ashley Prichard is a Ph.D. candidate in Emory University’s
Department of Psychology and first author of
the study. She said in a statement:
Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words
mean, but there really isn’t much scientific
evidence to support that. We wanted to get data from the dogs
themselves — not just owner reports.
Neuroscientist Gregory Berns is senior author of the study, and
author of the bestselling book What it’s
Like to be a Dog. Burns added:
We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some
aspects of human language since they can learn
to follow verbal commands. Previous research, however,
suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow
a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures and even emotional
expressions from their owners.
Berns is founder of the Dog Project, The project’s goal is to
better understand the dog’s mind. It was the
first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain
motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. .

Image via Gregory Burns.
The researchers focused on questions surrounding the brain
mechanisms dogs use to differentiate between
words, or even what constitutes a word to a dog.
For the current study, 12 dogs of varying breeds were trained to
retrieve two different objects, based on the
objects’ names. For the experiment, the trained dog lay in the
fMRI scanner while the dog’s owner stood
directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and
said the names of the dog’s toys at set
intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys.
Eddie, a golden retriever-Labrador mix, for instance, heard his
owner say the words piggy or monkey, then
his owner held up the matching toy. As a control, the owner
then spoke gibberish words – such as bobbu
and bodmick – then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the
brain to the novel invented words
compared to the trained words. Pritchard said:
We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between
words that they know and words that they don’t.
What’s surprising is that the result is opposite to that of
research on humans — people typically show greater
neural activation for known words than novel words.
The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater
neural activation to a new, unknown word
because they sense their owners want them to understand what
they are saying, and they are trying to do
so. Berns said:

Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also
receive praise or food.
He added:
Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning
and understanding human words, but they appear
to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they
have been taught, beyond just a low-level
Pavlovian response.
Source: Awake fMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word
Detection in Dogs
Bottom line: A new study looks at how dogs process words.
Read more from Emory University
Eleanor Imster
Eleanor Imster has helped write and edit EarthSky since 1995.
She was an integral part of the award-winning EarthSky
radio series almost since it began until it ended in 2013. Today,
as Lead Editor at EarthSky.org, she helps present the
science and nature stories and photos you enjoy. She also serves
as one of the voices of EarthSky on social media platforms
including Facebook, Twitter and G+. She and her husband live
in Tennessee and have two grown sons.

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Right? - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/us/politics/woman-
president-she-her.html?action=click&module=Top
Stories&pgtype=Homepage 1/5
https://nyti.ms/2RLcRXN
NEWS ANALYSIS
She̓ s the Next President. Wait, Did You
Read That Right?
A new study, which found that Americans were reluctant to use
the word “she” to describe a
hypothetical president, highlights the sneaky ways language
illuminates bias.
By Jessica Bennett
Jan. 24, 2020

It was a blip of a moment during the Democratic debate last
week, one perhaps overshadowed by a
long discussion of the prospect of a female president.
Responding to a question about climate
change, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, “I will
do everything a president can do all
by herself on the first day.”
All by herself. Did you clock the use of that word?
A study released this month shows that you did — and that, in
fact, it may have cost you a third of a
second in reading time just now.
Her. It’s a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly
endless debate over whether a woman
can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its
use, or an unconscious aversion to its
use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could
something as simple as a pronoun
reflect, or even affect, the way voters understand power?
That’s the question raised by the research, conducted by
cognitive scientists and linguists at M.I.T.,
the University of Potsdam and the University of California, San
Diego, who surveyed people during
the run-up to the 2016 election. Wanting to understand how
world events might influence language,
the researchers hypothesized that the possibility a woman would
be elected president at that time
might override the implicit bias people had toward referring to
the president as “he.”
But what they found was that Americans — even young, self-
identified Democratic women who
believed Hillary Clinton would win — were reluctant to use

“she” even in the context of a
hypothetical president.
“There seemed to be a real bias against referring to the next
president as ʻshe,’” said Roger Levy, a
professor of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. and one of
the authors of the study.
When the researchers watched subjects in a reading setting —
they were asked to read a short
passage about the next president, pressing a button on a screen
to reveal each word of the sentence
— their bias was even more pronounced: The word “she,” when
referring to the future president,
https://www.nytimes.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/by/jessica-bennett
https://www.nytimes.com/by/jessica-bennett
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/elizabet
h-warren.html
http://news.mit.edu/2020/she-missing-presidential-language-
0108
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619890619
made people cognitively stumble, leading to a “considerable
disruption” in reading time, said Titus
von der Malsburg, another author of the study and a linguist at
the University of Potsdam, in

Germany.
“People had difficulties reading ʻshe’ even if the text had
previously used ʻshe,’ showing how
persistent and deeply ingrained this bias is,” he said.
So could struggling to say or read the word “she” in the context
of a president affect our willingness
to vote for a woman?
“That’s of course the million-dollar question,” said Dr. von der
Malsburg.
He noted that if people gravitated toward male language when
talking about presidents, that could
indirectly contribute to a culture in which women were not seen
as typical candidates.
“And that, in turn, would likely influence election outcomes
because women would have to do extra
work to convince voters that they can do the job,” he said.
What lurks behind language?
When it comes to women in politics — and specifically, women
in the presidency — often lurking
behind language are unconscious assumptions about women in
power.
“We are uneasy with the president as ʻshe’ because
encountering it forces us to have in mind a new
conception of ʻpresident,’” the linguist Robin Lakoff said.
Dr. Lakoff, whose book “Language and Woman’s Place” helped
create the field of gender linguistics
in the 1970s, said that language tended to reflect the beliefs of a
particular moment in time.

But it can also shape them.
Research has found that the use of the pronoun “he” can create
a male bias in readers, that
countries with gendered language have higher gender inequality
and that even subtly sexist
language may influence voters’ likelihood of supporting a
particular candidate.
In recent years, some governments and organizations have
started paying more attention to the
power of words, taking steps to update or replace gendered
terms.
In 2013, Washington State joined Florida and Minnesota in
combing through its state codes and
statutes to adjust terms like “ombudsman” (now “ombuds”) to
be gender neutral. As Liz Watson,
then senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said
at the time: “Words matter. Words
help shape our perceptions about what opportunities are
available to women and men.”
Administrators at Yale announced in 2017 that they would
replace the words “freshman” and
“upperclassman” with “first-year” and “upper-level” students,
joining several other universities that
have informally made the change. And the singular “they” —
increasingly popular as both as
substitute for “he or she” and as a gender-neutral pronoun for
those who identify as nonbinary —
was recently declared the “Word of the Decade” by the
American Dialect Society.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00289252

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5
http://www.lakeresearch.com/news/NameItChangeIt/NameItCha
ngeIt.pres.pdf
https://ofco.wa.gov/
https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-gender-neutral-
language-rewritten-into-state-laws.html
https://www.americandialect.org/2019-word-of-the-year-is-my-
pronouns-word-of-the-decade-is-singular-they
That would seem like progress, said the historian Barbara J.
Berg. Yet when it comes to the halls of
power, she said, the masculine “remains the default in our
language.”
It is popular these days to tell the story of Abigail Adams, wife
of the founding father John, who
urged her husband in a letter in 1776 to “remember the ladies.”
Lesser known is that his reply, in a
letter back, called her request “saucy.” (The word “she,” of
course, does not appear anywhere in the
Declaration of Independence, nor does the word “woman.”)
And while, over the years, words like “mailman,” “policeman”
and “stewardess” have been replaced
with terms like “mail carrier,” “police officer” and “flight
attendant,” there are still plenty of phrases
for which “he” connotes power. Think “manning the command
post,” “maestro” or even “guy” as a

way to describe expertise. “As in, ʻHe’s a stats guy’ or ʻHe’s a
policy guy,’” said Philip N. Cohen, a
sociologist at the University of Maryland.
The 2018 midterm elections broke all sorts of records — and a
historic number of women ran for
office and won — and yet they also provided ample opportunity
to hear (and see) the phrase
“freshman congresswoman.” Doesn’t it sound sort of funny?
Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, described
how she had recently spoken with a
group of female judges, some of whom recalled being referred
to as “sir” when on the bench.
Presumably, Dr. Tannen said, the speakers were nervous — and
“sir” was an attempt to show
respect.
“ʻSir’ is associated with respect to an extent that ʻma’am’ is
not,” Dr. Tannen said, noting that she,
too, had occasionally stumbled over such words.
Once, she recalled, at an event in which Michelle Obama was
speaking, a friend remarked that “Dr.
Biden” would also be in attendance.
“I thought to myself, ʻOh, I didn’t know Joe Biden had a
Ph.D.,’” she said. “And of course it was his
wife, who I had met, and who I knew had a Ph.D. So even I do
it, Dr. Tannen.”
And then there’s “Madam.” During the 1970s, feminists fought
for the adoption of a female
equivalent of “Mr.” — one that did not denote marital status —
and were largely successful with the
honorific “Ms.” But male presidents in the United States are

often addressed as “Mr. President,”
while a woman — if the way we refer to cabinet secretaries is
any indication — would quite likely be
“Madam President.”
“ʻMadam’ could be a term of respect, but it’s also the head of a
brothel,” said Dr. Berg, the historian.
“So it’s like this constant subtle reminder of a woman’s status.”
A candidate who can ʻbring people with herʼ
But a new breed of candidates may be flipping that script.
During the recent Democratic debate, in addition to Ms.
Warren’s use of “herself” in reference to the
next president on more than one occasion, Senator Amy
Klobuchar of Minnesota said in her closing
statement, “We need a candidate who is actually going to bring
people with her.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/amy-
klobuchar.html
Senator Kamala Harris of California, who dropped out of the
race late last year, often did the same
when she was running. As California’s first female attorney
general, she sifted through the language
that was written into the law — statutes referring to the attorney
general as “he” or “his” — and

changed them.
“I’ve always been very aware that when it comes to women
holding leadership roles, we are
sometimes asking people to see what they have not seen
before,” Ms. Harris said in an email. “As
our government becomes more reflective of the people it
represents and the voices at the table
become more diverse, it is important for us to really check how
we are creating and supporting an
inclusive environment — and a big part of that is about how we
use language.”
Of course, one might argue there’s something of a feedback
loop: The language reflects the culture.
The culture won’t change until there is a winning candidate who
upends the old biases. But those
running for that spot may be impeded by the incessant talking
about gender.
The researchers say the United Kingdom may provide an
encouraging case study.
In 2017, they replicated the study there, in the lead-up to an
election to determine the next prime
minister.
Theresa May was prime minister at the time and was expected
to win — but she was not the first
woman to hold that post. (That was Margaret Thatcher.)
When referring to the next prime minister, the British study
participants were more likely to use the
pronoun “she” than “he.”
Sharon Attia contributed research.

Our 2020 Election Guide
Updated Jan. 29, 2020
The Latest
State of the Race
After stalling or slipping in the polls for most of 2019, Bernie
Sanders is closing
hard just before the leadoff contests. Here s̓ our latest analysis.
In the final days of the Iowa campaign, each of the leading
Democratic
candidates is driving a different message in Facebook ads.
•
Elizabeth Warren, shifting her strategy, is taking on the
electability question,
urging voters to embrace “courage over cynicism.”
•
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/kam
ala-harris-electability
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polls.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module
=styln-elections-
2020&variant=show&region=BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT&cont
ext=Guide
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/29/us/politics/iow

a-facebook-political-
ads.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=
styln-elections-
ext=Guide
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warren-iowa-
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1/31/2020 English’s Pronoun Problem Is Centuries Old - The
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/whats-your-
pronoun-dennis-
baron.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage
1/2
https://nyti.ms/3azCFPp
NONFICTION
By Joe Moran
Published Jan. 21, 2020 Updated Jan. 22, 2020
WHAT’S YOUR PRONOUN?
Beyond He & She
By Dennis Baron
“Pronouns are suddenly sexy,” Dennis Baron declares at the
start of “What’s Your

Pronoun?” For “pronouns,” read one specific pronoun, or rather
its long-lamented absence
in English: the third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun.
And for “sexy,” read thorny.
Pronouns now come up in lawsuits, school regulations and
company codes of conduct.
Colleges ask students to provide their preferred pronouns;
online dating sites offer pronoun
options. “It used to be nerdy to discuss parts of speech outside
of grammar class,” Baron, a
professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University
of Illinois, writes. “Now it’s
cool.”
After this slightly forced attempt at with-itness, “What’s Your
Pronoun?” settles down into a
scrupulous and absorbing survey. Its great virtue is to show that
these issues are nothing
new: Gender-neutral pronouns like “ze,” “thon” and “heer” have
been circulating since the
mid-19th century; others as far back as 1375.
Almost no one now defends the use of a generic “he” — but
what to replace it with? Baron is
surely right that no one cares for “his or her”: too unwieldy. As
for the pronouns historically
proposed to replace “he” or “she,” they failed to gain traction
because “they look strange on
the page.”
Coiners of new pronouns might usefully counter that they want
these words to look strange,
so as to draw attention to the social construction of gender or
the patriarchal roots of
traditional pronouns. Fair enough, but the point about pronouns
is that they replace nouns,

and thus trade the specific for the generic — so they will
probably catch on only when they
are inconspicuous. In writing, a pronoun that draws attention to
itself stops the reader’s eye
and checks their pace at the wrong point in a sentence.
Englishs̓ Pronoun Problem Is
Centuries Old
https://www.nytimes.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/world/europe/christian-
transgender-uk.html?searchResultPosition=1
1/31/2020 English’s Pronoun Problem Is Centuries Old - The
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/whats-your-
pronoun-dennis-
baron.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage
2/2
For Baron the solution is clear, and I used it (hopefully
unobtrusively) in that last sentence:
the singular “they.” He provides ample textual evidence, from
Shakespeare on, that this is a
perfectly respectable option — and so unconscious that even
those who condemn it invoke it
without noticing.
For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is
older than singular “you.”
Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou”
and “thee.” Having the same
pronoun for both singular and plural forms makes for potential
ambiguity. So colloquial

plural forms have sprung up, such as “y’all,” common in the
American South, or the more
recent “you guys” — an oddly gendered locution at a time when
the generic “he” is
becoming extinct. Still, we get by. No one considers ditching
the singular “you.”
For Baron, the benefit of singular “they” is that it is often used
by those in search of a
nonbinary or gender-neutral pronoun, as well as those who give
such issues little thought.
While many language mavens are coming around reluctantly to
singular “they” — in
December Merriam-Webster anointed “they” its “word of the
year” — some traditionalists
still hold out against it. Their defense is convention. I admit
that the nonbinary use of “they”
to refer to a specific person — “Alex likes their burger with
mustard” — still sounds jangly to
my ears. I will get used to it. Language, as Baron eloquently
shows, works as a dynamic
democracy, not as rule by experts. The sticklers may not like
“they” (singular) but they
(plural) will eventually have to bow to the inevitable.
Baron’s book layers on rather too many examples of historical
usage, including a 60-page
“chronology of gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns” at the
end. This scholarly
assiduousness, though, also makes him the ideal pilot through
these contentious political-
linguistic waters. If you want to know why more people are
asking “what’s your pronoun?”
then you (singular or plural) should read this book.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/merriam-webster-they-
word-year.html

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