New study finds dogs really do understand what we say

By Sharin Hussain via SWNS

Dogs really do understand when people talk to them, according to a new study.

Our four-legged friends generally know that certain words “stand for” certain objects, say scientists.

When dogs hear those words, brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds.

First author Dr. Marianna Boros, of Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, said: “Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words.

“They also don’t just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name.”

Researchers add that word understanding tests with individuals who do not speak usually require active choice.

These tests include showing or getting an object after hearing its name and only a few dogs do well on these tests.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, analyses what words or phrases dogs understand by measuring brain activity using non-invasive Electroencephalography (EEG) without asking them to act.

They had 18 dog owners say words for toys their dogs knew and then present the object or mismatched object to them to see how they react.

The brain recording results showed a different pattern in the brain when the dogs were shown a matching object versus a mismatched one.

Researchers have seen these results in humans too and it is accepted as evidence that they understand the words.

The researchers also noted that having a larger vocabulary of objects didn’t make a difference in the results.

Co-first author Professor Lilla Magyari said: “Because typical dogs learn instruction words rather than object names, and there are only a handful of dogs with a large vocabulary of object words, we expected that dogs’ capacity for referential understanding of object words will be linked to the number of object words they know; but it wasn’t.”

Dr. Boro added: “It doesn’t matter how many object words a dog understands—known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects.”

Researchers say that the discovery that dogs might have the capacity to understand words may reshape the way scientists think about the uniqueness of how humans use and understand language.

They also question if it is something that other mammals could possibly do.

Prof Magyari added: “Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of.

“Dogs are not merely learning a specific behaviour to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do.”