Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words by John W. Pilley & Hilary Hinzmann

Author:John W. Pilley & Hilary Hinzmann [Pilley, John W. & Hinzmann, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

12

Getting Published

BY THE TIME Chaser turned three in the spring of 2007, she knew more than a thousand objects by their proper noun names. There were 800 stuffed animals, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees, and 100-plus plastic and rubber items. I began writing a paper that would share the impressive results of her learning. I hadn’t written a peer-reviewed paper in a long time, but I knew the form well. And I thought I had an excellent recent model in the Rico paper, which was distinctive not only for its content but also for its fairly conversational style, though I intended to provide a more thorough explanation of my training and testing procedures.

I included the full spectrum of language learning I observed in Chaser, even if I didn’t have extensive data on some aspects of it. I believed that the remarkable nature of the findings would justify publication in journal editors’ eyes. I entitled the paper “Can a Dog Learn Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs, and Prepositions?”

My hope was that Science, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal along with Britain’s Nature, would publish the paper as a sequel of sorts to the Kaminski paper on Rico. And I hoped they’d ask Paul Bloom to contribute another “Perspective,” in which he would acknowledge that Chaser’s learning met all the basic criteria for word learning. Toward the end of the summer I told Alliston Reid that I was going to send the paper to Science.

With a smile Alliston said, “They only give you one shot there, John.”

“I know,” I said. “But they published the Rico paper and I’ve gotta think this is a pretty good shot, given how much Chaser has learned and how she’s met Bloom’s and Markman and Abelev’s major criteria for referential understanding. Here’s hoping, anyhow.”

A few days after that, with my eyes blurry from reading and rereading for typos and grammatical errors, I sent the paper to Science. Several weeks later an editor at Science briefly e-mailed me to say that upon review they were rejecting the paper. There was little detail as to what might have been said about the paper during the review process or what its specific flaws might be.

I was stunned.

Rereading my paper, I confirmed that my experimental procedures in testing Chaser’s understanding of proper noun words and her ability to learn by exclusion were identical to those in the Rico study. In addition I had sharpened the paradigm for testing Chaser’s exclusion learning by establishing that she had no baseline preference for novel objects. Likewise, I had described rigorous procedures for teaching and testing the learning of common nouns.

But I had to admit that some critical details of my studies were missing. Unfortunately I had not presented the usual tables and figures to display my findings but had only described them in words and a few key numbers. I also recognized that much of the paper was too informal and did not say enough about how Chaser attained her language learning and how I tested it. So I optimistically set about rewriting the paper.

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