Early studies attempting interspecies communication with great apes trained to use sign language and Augmented Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices were limited by methodological and technological constraints, as well as restrictive sample sizes. Evidence for animals' intentional production of symbols was met with considerable criticisms which could not be easily deflected with existing data. More recently, thousands of pet dogs have been trained with AIC devices comprising soundboards of buttons that can be pressed to produce prerecorded human words or phrases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPast research on interspecies communication has shown that animals can be trained to use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, such as soundboards, to make simple requests of their caretakers. The recent uptake in AIC devices by hundreds of pet owners around the world offers a novel opportunity to investigate whether AIC is possible with owner-trained family dogs. To answer this question, we carried out two studies to test pet dogs' ability to recognise and respond appropriately to food-related, play-related, and outside-related words on their soundboards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith mixed-effects regression models becoming a mainstream tool for every psycholinguist, there has become an increasing need to understand them more fully. In the last decade, most work on mixed-effects models in psycholinguistics has focused on properly specifying the random-effects structure to minimize error in evaluating the statistical significance of fixed-effects predictors. The present study examines a potential misspecification of random effects that has not been discussed in psycholinguistics: violation of the single-subject-population assumption, in the context of logistic regression.
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