A little experiment...

[creepy_rabbit]

Ok, this is will sound really weird and I don't want you fellow escapists to get any funny ideas about me, but I have thought about an experiment that would be really interesting to make; Imagine putting a newborn baby in a cell that is only inhabited by say a dog-family, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and let the dogs raise the kid untill he is big enough, then learning him to speak a human language and then learn us to communicate with the dogs, how do you think it would work?

 

[The Cheezy One]

id like to see the outcome, but not waste the human childs existence by doing so
interesting idea, but it could never legally happen or be accepted by the community in general

 

[Baby Tea]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

 

[ideitbawx]

easier said than done. wouldn't get my hopes up

 

[Kpt._Rob]

It wouldn't. We actually have case studies of where this has actually happened. These are called feral children. (though they're not the result of experiment so much as unfortunate circumstance). The point is that there is a critical age, after which the mental structures in the brain designed for the learning of language begin to degrade, so a child raised by dogs would probably not be able to learn more than the crudest basics of the human language.

 

[TheNamlessGuy]

DELETED

 

[creepy_rabbit]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

sigh i knew someone would come to that, if you disregard that aspect how would you think it'll work?

 

[creepy_rabbit]

b

It wouldn't. We actually have case studies of where this has actually happened. These are called feral children. (though they're not the result of experiment so much as unfortunate circumstance). The point is that there is a critical age, after which the mental structures in the brain designed for the learning of language begin to degrade, so a child raised by dogs would probably not be able to learn more than the crudest basics of the human language.

but we "normal" humans can learn many languages

id like to see the outcome, but not waste the human childs existence by doing so
interesting idea, but it could never legally happen or be accepted by the community in general

not even in russia?

 

[Syphous]

Yeah like Kpt._Rob said, this has already pretty much happened. I actually watched a show on History channel (or some equivalent) that was all about a feral child that they tried to house train and teach English, if I remember correctly it was a fail, and the child grew up eating milk bones... ok that last part may have been made up.

 

[Legion]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

It'd be really sick if they did it, came back 18 years later to see how well the person is only to find the remains then someone would say "I knew there was something we left out".

 

[Destal]

It wouldn't. We actually have case studies of where this has actually happened. These are called feral children. (though they're not the result of experiment so much as unfortunate circumstance). The point is that there is a critical age, after which the mental structures in the brain designed for the learning of language begin to degrade, so a child raised by dogs would probably not be able to learn more than the crudest basics of the human language.

You summed it up quite well. There was even a movie about it, though the name escapes me at the moment. The child would never be able to function in society normally if it grew up in that enviroment. One of the most well documented cases of this happening was in the 70's or 80's and the child had the worlds leading shrinks and speech pathologists working with the girl and they could never get her beyond just parroting what she heard. I believe they found her when she was 8 years old.

 

[Lord George]

There are a few case studies of children being raised feral with the aid of wolves (along with monkeys) wikipeida has some recorded cases and I'm sure there's more out there as I recall studying one case for a psychology exam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#1980s_to_2000

 

[Tartarga]

DOGS ATE MY BABY!!!!!!!

 

[Distorted Stu]

Dogs use body language to communicate with eachother, its one of the primary reasons they wage their tails. They do it because they are pack animals and need a sense of direction between eachother. The baby will adapt some form of wagging and licking etc

 

[creepy_rabbit]

Dogs use body language to communicate with eachother, its one of the primary reasons they wage their tails. They do it because they are pack animals and need a sense of direction between eachother. The baby will adapt some form of wagging and licking etc

the baby can also wage its tail

 

[fletch_talon]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

Unless it was a large breed of dog which adopted the child.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a video of one animal taking another and accepting it as its own... I'd probably have an extra 5 dollars or so but still...

 

[creepy_rabbit]

cmon people! lets keep this thread going!

 

[Kpt._Rob]

b

It wouldn't. We actually have case studies of where this has actually happened. These are called feral children. (though they're not the result of experiment so much as unfortunate circumstance). The point is that there is a critical age, after which the mental structures in the brain designed for the learning of language begin to degrade, so a child raised by dogs would probably not be able to learn more than the crudest basics of the human language.

but we "normal" humans can learn many languages

We "normal" humans already have learned the basic structures of language. We understand verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs, and how they all need to be aligned to create meaning. Even when we learn different languages where the position of their alignment is different, we can still use our established neural pathways to translate our English thoughts into German, Russian, French, etc...

The documentary to which people keep refering is called Wild Child: The Story of Feral Children. It's quite good, and if you're too lazy to rent it from Netflix or something, you can find it on Google video for free. Of particular interest to your proposition is the case of Oxana Malaya, a feral child who was raised by dogs, and whose case is examined in the film.

 

[Housebroken Lunatic]

but we "normal" humans can learn many languages

Yes, but that's because we have grown up and our brain's development have adjusted to a specific mindset which makes the concept language learnable.

While dogs communicate with eachother, they don't really use a language for it in the sense that humans understand it. We have our own ways of conveying information to eachother, and this way that we call language has been developed to convey both basic information and very abstract information (something dogs do not engage in on the same advanced levels as humans).

Dogs communicating also use several other parts of their body than just their vocal chords and mouth like humans do. They wag their tails, they lift their ears, make several kinds of noises and also using their extremely advanced sense of smell.

A normal infant doesn't have a tail, nor will it ever develop the same advanced sense of smell that dogs have. So trying to make an infant "tune in" on how dogs communicate would be like trying to get a deaf, mute and partially blind person to completely understand human language. While a deaf, mute and partially blind person can certainly grasp the idea, there are aspects of human communication which these people will never be able to understand or express themselves with.

Try describing the colour red to a person that has been blind since birth, and you'll see the difficulties which im refering too.

Still, it is an interesting and mind boggling hypothesis though.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

A normal infant doesn't have a tail, nor will it ever develop the same advanced sense of smell that dogs have. So trying to make an infant "tune in" on how dogs communicate would be like trying to get a deaf, mute and partially blind person to completely understand human language. While a deaf, mute and partially blind person can certainly grasp the idea, there are aspects of human communication which these people will never be able to understand or express themselves with.

Actually, you're kind of wrong there. An infant raised by dogs will learn to communicate as a dog does. I mentioned in the post just above yours the case of Oxana Malaya. If you want to watch the documentary, you'll see that Oxana literally moves like a dog (not like a human imitating a dog), she literally barks like a dog, she literally acts like a dog. To her mind she is a dog. It is not actually all that far fetched that a human could learn a dog's methods of communicating if raised by dogs (even those of us not raised by dogs understand many of their methods of communicating) because the fact is that dog communication is simply a lower step on the evolutionary scale, the genetic ancestors of humans probably communicated like dogs, through grunts, barks, and various physical gestures, and we haven't completely left these elements behind, we've just advanced them far beyond what a dog would be capable of.