Can Your Dog Understand You? What the Science Shows
Can your dog understand words? It seems obvious, on some level, because you can say certain words to your dog, and you’ll get a response.
Cookie. Treat. Walk. Outside. You know, words like those.
So, clearly, dogs do have some sort of innate ability to understand language. And you may have also seen some videos on social media of dogs using soundboards to “talk” themselves. Animals have communicated with humans — gorillas have been taught to communicate with people using American Sign Language, for instance — but if you’re seeing those videos of dogs using technology to “speak” with their owners, how legit is it? Do they know what they’re doing, or just following some cues?
Researchers from our own backyard, at the University of California San Diego, tried to find out. A study was recently published in PLOS ONE, and found that yes, dogs who are trained to use soundboards to communicate often do understand the words that they’re using, and can use soundboards to effectively communicate in some cases.
In other words: Some dogs can talk! Sort of.
The study’s findings
From the results of the study:
“Our study suggests that dogs were more likely to perform play-related behaviours after an experimenter or their owner produced a play-related word, and were more likely to exhibit outside-related behaviours in response to an experimenter or their owner producing an outside-related word. This demonstrates that dogs are, at the very least, capable of learning an association between these words or buttons and their outcomes in the world.
Further:
“In sum, our findings provide the first evidence of button word comprehension by owner-trained soundboard-using dogs, and demonstrate that dogs’ contextually appropriate responses to button presses were comparable regardless of the identity of the person using the soundboard, and the absence of other environmental cues related to that word.”
So, yes, it seems we do have a bit of conclusive scientific proof that dogs understand and may be able to communicate using human language and English words. The study was led by Federico Rossano, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego and head of the Comparative Cognition Lab, who said that “this study addresses public skepticism about whether dogs truly understand what the buttons mean,” according to a UC San Diego release. “Our findings are important because they show that words matter to dogs, and that they respond to the words themselves, not just to associated cues.”
More about dogs and language
Beyond this most recent study, we do have other research that has explored dogs’ ability to comprehend human language. Some of that research has found that dogs can process speech quickly — more or less at the same speed as a human — and in a way that human babies do, too. That is, dogs don’t hear words in quite the same way humans do, so they can hear similar words (bit versus sit, for instance), and get the two mixed up.
Put differently, dogs don’t listen to phonetic details, which is a marked difference between how dogs and humans process speech.
Also, some dogs are simply better than others at understanding and processing language and speech. Border Collies tend to be one breed that’s particularly gifted at it, too. In fact, there are dogs out there who can learn hundreds of words, and some have even shown the ability to learn the specific names given to objects (like “Teddy” for a toy bear).
Now, if only dogs could learn to tell us that they’re due for a vet appointment!
Contact us to make an appointment today!
Read more: