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Monkeys Show Language Recognition
mmmscience writes "The cotton-top tamarin monkeys can apparently tell the difference between suffixes and prefixes. They will turn to face the direction of recorded words when they hear the nonsense syllables "bi-shoy" change to "shoy-bi." The lead author, Ansgar Endress, suggests that this is just like how human infants learn language, by tracking the beginning and ends of words."
Perhaps you'd be better served actually getting what scientists think from scientists, rather than science journalism. Linguists, especially those researching the origins of language, are rather careful to delineate other forms of animal communication from language, because that's rather the whole point of the exercise. Any animal with sufficient neural complexity and an operating auditory nerve can be taught some sort of verbal commands. But when we analyze, for instance, the way chimps can be taught something that seems rather akin to a proto-language, we're talking about a considerably more complex phenomena than "din din!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Your dog would need to learn an infinite number of words to qualify for this research.
($phoneticstring + "bi") != ("bi" + $phoneticstring)
Your dog listens to your commands much like the classic Farside "Blah blah blah blah rex blah blah blah sit".
The ordering of your commands is unimportant.
The monkeys are able on the other hand to break apart components of a word and find meaning in the placement itself. And not just previously learned sequences either. Meaning from syllabic placement is a more advanced ability than meaning from a syllable. This is pretty critical to language development where word ordering is important to meaning. "The monkey at the banana." vs "The banana ate the monkey."