Department of Medical Clinics, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e29689. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029689. Epub 2012 Feb 1.
Syntax use by non-human animals remains a controversial issue. We present here evidence that a dog may respond to verbal requests composed of two independent terms, one referring to an object and the other to an action to be performed relative to the object. A female mongrel dog, Sofia, was initially trained to respond to action (point and fetch) and object (ball, key, stick, bottle and bear) terms which were then presented as simultaneous, combinatorial requests (e.g. ball fetch, stick point). Sofia successfully responded to object-action requests presented as single sentences, and was able to flexibly generalize her performance across different contexts. These results provide empirical evidence that dogs are able to extract the information contained in complex messages and to integrate it in directed performance, an ability which is shared with other linguistically trained animals and may represent a forerunner of syntactic functioning.
非人类动物的语法使用仍然是一个有争议的问题。我们在这里提出证据表明，狗可能会对由两个独立的术语组成的口头请求做出反应，一个术语指的是对象，另一个术语指的是相对于对象要执行的动作。一只雌性杂种狗，Sofia，最初接受了对动作（指向和取物）和对象（球、钥匙、棍子、瓶子和熊）术语的反应训练，然后这些术语被作为同时的、组合的请求（例如球取物、棍子指向）呈现出来。Sofia 成功地对作为单个句子呈现的对象-动作请求做出了反应，并且能够灵活地将她的表现推广到不同的情境中。这些结果提供了经验证据，表明狗能够提取复杂信息中的信息，并将其整合到有指导的表现中，这种能力与其他受过语言训练的动物共享，可能代表了句法功能的先驱。
