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When Bunny presses “Settle, Sound, Ouch,” she might be using a novel string of known words to tell someone to quiet down, or she might be pressing a random series of buttons while confirmation bias on our part does the rest of the work. Even Devine says that she thinks Bunny’s “speech” is primarily operant conditioning, where Bunny has made an association between pressing a button and something happening. A true understanding of language goes beyond simple associations, and involves pulling unique combinations of words together into narratives.

Pet owners and cognitive scientists are exploring if we can teach dogs to speak with buttons, called AAC devices. --- “I do have to say, ‘Okay, how much am I reading into this?’ How much of this is anthropomorphized and how much is like, I’ve already interpreted these buttons in this way, so I’m going to continue to interpret and it becomes its own sort of dialect?” she says. “I try and remain open to all of the possibilities.”