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Beyond understanding that some words represent some actions or orders, dogs identify some words with specific objects.
This is the conclusion of a work by the University of Stavanger (Norway) and Universidad Eötvös Lorand (Hungary).
According to what is published in ‘Current Biology’, when dogs hear those words, they brain activity records suggest that they activate a matching mental representation in their minds.
“Dogs not only react with learned behavior to certain words,” contextualizes Marianna Boros from the Department of Ethology of the Universidad Eötvös Lorándone of the first co-authors of the article.
“They also don’t simply associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without actually understanding the meaning of those words, but rather they activate the memory of an object when they hear its name,” he said.
The researchers report that the word comprehension tests with nonverbal people, such as babies and animals, they generally require active choice.
They are asked to show or get an object after hearing its name.
How dogs identify and understand words
Very few dogs do well on these types of tests in the laboratory, often picking up objects correctly at a rate expected by chance.
Therefore, the researchers wanted to take a closer look at the dogs’ implicit understanding of the target words by measuring the brain activity using EEG (electroencephalogram) without asking them to act.
The idea was that this could offer a more sensitive measure of their understanding of the language.
In their studies, they had 18 dog owners say words for toys that their dogs knew and then introduce them to them.
Sometimes they presented the corresponding toy, while other times they presented a mismatched object.
For example, one owner said: “Zara, look, the ball” and presented the object while the dog’s brain activity was captured in an EEG.
Dogs learn words
The results of the brain recording showed a different pattern in the brain when dogs were shown a matching object versus a mismatched one.
This is similar to what researchers have observed in humans and is widely accepted as evidence that they understand words.
The researchers also found a greater difference in the patterns of the words the dogs knew best or identified, offering more support for your understanding of the object words.
Interestingly, while the researchers thought this ability might depend on having a large vocabulary of object wordstheir findings showed that this is not the case.
“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 would be linked to the number of object words they used. know; But it wasn’t like that,” he says. Lila Hungarianalso from Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Stavanger and another co-author of the study.
The mental representations of dogs
“It doesn’t matter how many target words a dog understands; familiar words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who they know the names of many objects“adds Boros.
The researchers say the discovery that dogs as a species may generally have the ability to understand words in a referential way, just as humans do, could change the way scientists think about the singularity of how humans use and understand language.
This has important implications for the theories and models of language evolution. For dog owners, it is also an important discovery. “His dog understands more than he shows,” says Magyari.
Understand referential language
“Dogs not only learn a specific behavior towards certain wordsbut they can also understand the meaning of some individual words like humans do.”
Researchers are now curious to know if this ability to understand the language referential is specific to dogs or could also be present in other mammals.
Either way, they want to learn more about how this ability came about and whether it depends on the unique experience of dogs living with people.
They also want to know why, if dogs understand object wordsmost do not show it
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