Signs and wonders

It is a wonder to me that a human less than a year and a half old can identify all of these as “doggie.”

“Doggie.”

“Doggie!”

It’s enough to make me want to get a degree in semiotics from Brown University, or at least re-read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Can any other animal understand such abstract signs? The work on this veers towards ridiculous:

The monkeys chose between ‘tokens’ that represent actual foods. After choosing one of the two token options, monkeys could exchange their token with the corresponding food. What they saw was that the capuchin monkeys assigned a value for each token and food item. Capuchins were indifferent between one Cheerio and two pieces of parmesan cheese, indicating that the value of one Cheerio is equal to two times the value of one piece of parmesan cheese. When choosing between tokens that represented the same foods, the relative value increased – for example, capuchins were indifferent between one Cheerio-token and four parmesan-tokens.