Ever wish your dog could understand you? New research suggests they can

• Published date: 24 March 2024
• Author: JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

But a new study from Hungary has made the surprising discovery by recording brain activity that dogs generally also know that certain words "stand for" certain objects. When they hear those words, they activate a matching mental representation in their minds

"Dogs don't react with a learned behavior to certain words," said Marianna Boros of the ethology department at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. "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."

Word understanding tests with infants and animals that don't speak usually require active choice, the researchers explained. They're asked to show or get an object after hearing its name. Very few dogs do well on such tests in the lab, often fetching objects correctly at the same rate as expected by chance.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to look closer at dogs' implicit understanding of object words by measuring brain activity using non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG). The idea was that this might offer a more-sensitive measure of their understanding of language. They have just published their findings in the journal Current Biology under the title "Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs."

They had 18 dog owners say words for toys their dogs knew and then present the objects to them. Sometimes they presented the matching toy while other times they would present an object that didn't match. For example, an owner would say, "Zara, look – a ball!" and presented the object while the dog's brain activity was captured on EEG.

Brain patterns and word recognition

The brain recording results showed a different pattern in the brain when the dogs were shown a matching object versus a mismatched one, similarly to what we see in humans and what is widely accepted as evidence that they understand the words. The researchers also found a greater difference in those patterns for words that dogs knew better, offering further support for their understanding of object words. While the researchers thought this ability might depend on having a large vocabulary of object words, their findings showed that it doesn't.

"Because dogs generally 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...