Do you ever feel as though your dog can understand what you’re saying?
While it’s no secret that dogs can recognize words like ‘food’ and ‘walkies’, and can tell if you’re getting out the best dog treats or a favorite toy, a new study has found that they might be even better at understanding human speech than we previously thought – they can pick out words in conversations they aren’t involved in, allowing them to eavesdrop.
Per research carried out by the University of Sussex and the University of Lincoln in the UK and published in Animal Cognition, dogs can identify words that are relevant to them from regular streams of conversation – even when they’re spoken in an unemotive tone and not directly to the dog.
Fifty-three dogs belonging to various breeds took part in the study. Each dog was played streams of monotonous speech containing both relevant and irrelevant words and phrases, and would turn toward their parents when hearing familiar words.
Usually, when speaking to dogs, we use dog-directed speech at the same time as trying to read dog body language in return. This is similar to the infant-directed speech we use with young children, where we might say words or phrases in isolation and use a higher pitch or more expression. So, the study indicates that dogs can understand familiar words without their usual context clues.
Lead author Professor David Reby, of the University of Sussex, said: “Our research shows that dogs are able to pick out and recognize words relevant to them in a monotonous stream of otherwise irrelevant speech, even in the absence of the intonation cues we usually use to engage them.
“While this could be as a result of domestication by humans, further research should be conducted on wolves and other wild species to test if they have similar abilities.”
Dr Holly Root-Gutteridge, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Lincoln, added: “The results show just how good dogs are at listening to us and how much they understand of what we say.
“This enhances our knowledge of how more complex communication and call sequences arose, which are necessary building blocks for language itself. This suggests that the ability to parse out complex communication, picking up meaningful fragments in babble, exists in a domesticated species rather than being special to humans.”
Going forward, the researchers are planning to find out the age at which puppies first begin to respond to human speech, which will help us learn more about language acquisition and evolution.
If you’d like to better communicate with your own dog, meanwhile, you might find this article useful: I learned these five dog body language cues and they changed my relationship with my dog.
