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Many dog owners have the sense that their pets can speak their language.
They not only respond to verbal cues like “sit” and “stay,” but also ones referring to their favourite objects.
If you say to a dog, “Bring me your ball” that's probably what they'll fetch.
New research in Hungary has found that as well as responding to commands like "roll over,” dogs can learn to associate words with specific objects.
It's a relationship with language called referential understanding which had been unproven in dogs until now.
The study was conducted at the Department of Ethology of the Eotvos University in Budapest.
Researcher, Marianna Boros explains.
"The difficulty here is that, when they have to perform a command, it's their own body, so it refers to them. But when we are talking about objects, objects are external to the dogs. And dogs have to learn that words refer, they stand for something that is external to them. And it seems that this is a difficulty, and it has been a very long debate in language evolution and comparative science, whether non-humans can do that."
The research used electrodes attached to dogs heads to measure brain activity.
Dog owners participating in the study would play an audio clip in which they said the name of their dog's toy like "ball" or "frisbee" and then show the dog an object.
The researchers measured the dogs' brain activity when the object in the recording matched the object that was displayed, and also when it changed.
Ms Boros says dogs were able to understand what was being said by owners.
"Here we set out to study this using a non-invasive way, using EEG, because even if dog owners claim that their dogs understand object words, when we test them - except for some exceptional dogs - an everyday dog, a typical family dog, will fail to fetch something just by its name. So we were curious whether passively they understand the meaning of the words. And the short answer is: yes. We found that they do understand.”
The experiments were conducted on 18 dogs and showed a different brain pattern when the dogs were shown an object which matched the verbal cue than when it was different.
It's suggested the animals evoked a mental image of an object based on hearing its name, and reacted when they saw something different than they expected.
They found that brain responses were different when an owner showed a matching object compared to when they showed a mismatching object.
Ms Boros says the study is important not only for dogs, but to better understand humans.
"When we are studying dogs, we are not only studying dogs, but we also try to say something about humans. So when we are trying to pinpoint some kind of capacities in dogs or understand how the brain is processing certain types of stimuli, we also learn in the meantime about what is shared with humans and what might be uniquely human. And the question of how humans came to be the one species who are using speech and language so widely is something that has interested humans, I think, since the beginning."
Scientists believe that the first dogs began to be domesticated by humans up to 30,000 years ago, and have lived closely alongside us ever since.
But whether dogs acquired to understand referential language during evolution remains unclear.
For dog owner and study volunteer Paula Perez , the findings confirm what she expected.
"We always have this idea that our dogs might understand us more than we think. So yeah, I think with her she's very active, she really likes to play. I always have the feeling that she can bring me or recognize some of the objects that she plays with. But I never had the proof."
Emese says the results might make her rethink how she trains her four legged friend.
"My dog understands the word ‘game’. Then he does not bring the ball, but another toy. I don’t teach dogs object names so much, but maybe we should."
