Agencia EFE – Besides sitting or coming when their owners call, dogs understand more than meets the eye. Scientists have discovered that they can recognize words that represent objects.
A study reported in the journal Current Biology found that when dogs hear words representing objects they know, they activate a corresponding mental representation in their minds.
The researchers, affiliated with universities in Hungary and Norway, had 18 dog owners pronounce words for toys their dogs knew and then present the objects to them.
Sometimes, they would show him the matching toy, while others would show him something else. For example, one owner would call his dog, say, “The ball,” and present him with the ball.
Other times, they would call his name but present him with an object other than the ball to see how he reacted, while the researchers recorded his brain activity with a noninvasive test.
The request was made without asking them to act to focus on their language comprehension.
THEY UNDERSTAND MORE THAN THEY SEEM TO
The brain recordings of the 18 dogs in these tests showed a different pattern in the brain when the dogs were shown an object that matched the word mentioned with one that did not.
The dogs’ response is similar to what researchers have observed in humans and is widely accepted as evidence that they understand the words.
The researchers also observed a typical pattern in the words the dogs knew best, corroborating their understanding of the objects.
Although they initially thought that this word recognition ability required knowledge of the broader vocabulary, their findings have shown that this is not the case.
“Dogs not only react with learned behavior to certain words but also trigger a memory of an object when they hear its name,” says Marianna Boros, a researcher in Ethology at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, in a statement from the center.
“It doesn’t matter how many object words a dog understands: familiar words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is present across the board in all dogs and not just in a few exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects,” she adds.
EXTENDABLE TO OTHER ANIMALS?
According to the researchers, the discovery that dogs, as a species, can understand words referentially, just like humans, may change the way scientists think about the uniqueness of how humans use and understand language.
“Dogs do not simply learn specific behavior to specific words, but could actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do,” they note.
The researchers now want to know whether this ability to understand referential language is specific to dogs or may also be present in other mammals. It also intends to decipher how this ability arose and whether it depends on dogs’ unique experience of living with people.