New research suggests dogs can understand human language better than we previously thought and pair words with objects.
Researchers looked at brain recordings from dogs, which suggested they could understand that some words "stand for" objects. Here's what that means and why it's so cool.
A new study published in the scientific journal Current Biology shows that dogs might understand some words that are in place for objects, suggesting that they may recognize objects in a similar way to humans.
“For decades, there has been a debate about whether animals are capable of such a level of abstraction,” study leader Marianna Boros, a neuroscientist and ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, told the Los Angeles Times.
Boros and her research team wanted to determine whether dogs understood words that have meaning, similar to how humans process language.
To do this, the team examined how language processing is sustained in humans and got an electroencephalogram machine (EEG), which looks at brain waves. Those brain waves look different based on how language is being understood.
"The researchers connected the EEG electrodes to the heads of 27 dogs. Then the dogs listened to recordings of their owners using the familiar words in simple sentences like, 'Luna, here’s the ball,'" the Los Angeles Times explained.
And the results were interesting. According to the Times, "With all but four of those animals, the EEGs revealed a distinct pattern: The wave signals dipped significantly lower when there was a match between the word and the object than when there wasn’t."
According to the researchers, this is very similar to how humans respond to words that appear out of place. "Boros and her colleagues posit that the same thing happens in the brains of dogs," the publication shares.
"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," says Lilla Magyari, also of Eötvös Loránd University and University of Stavanger and the other co-first author, according to the study release.
"Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of," Magyari adds. "Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do."
You Can Teach Your Dog to 'Talk' Using Buttons
There are many exciting ways to communicate with your dog, and as we continue to learn more and more about how their brains work and how much of our language they understand, we will find so many cool ways to speak to each other, including buttons.
According to the American Kennel Club, a dog parent has figured out a way to teach her dog how to talk using buttons.
"Christina Hunger MA, CCC-SLP, a San Diego-based speech-language pathologist, has discovered a way to train her dog to actually speak to her using adaptive speech technologies — speech buttons pre-programmed with words that her dog Stella can select between to communicate wants, needs, and thoughts," the organization explains.
These recordable buttons are available to purchase, and there are loads of different brands and stores selling them—these work by being used in your dog's everyday life. You teach them by showing them at first, using the buttons when you're trying to cue them for the specific task.
"Using buttons for communication, you want your dog to mirror you, by watching you push the button before doing a specific activity they will over time learn to push the button themselves to cue to you they would like to do the activity," the organization explains. "Again, the key to this is consistency and patience."
So, it seems our dogs probably understand more than we give them credit for. How cool?!