Dogs understand the words spoken to them, says study

Dogs are able to respond to various commands made by their owners, but these often wonder if they understand what is said or just intonation or any “hint” of what was spoken, responding automatically. A survey published on Wednesday offers the first answers to this question and indicates that man’s best friend is able to process the most sophisticated form of human speech than imagined.

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Orienting Asymmetries in Dogs’ Responses to Different Communicatory Components of Human Speech

Current Biology article

My dog knows names, for example if I say Mr Mutant’s name, she’ll go looking for him. Or if we’re in the car, she’s quite antsy until I say “we’re going to see Ro” and then she knows where we’re going and she calms down.

Unfortunately she’s yet to understand, “You have to step OVER the power cord to the fan”.

Pfft! My dog not only understands words, she says them!

Oh, M-u-u-u-m!
I don’t know
Out.

;)

kii said:

Oh, M-u-u-u-m!

I like that she speaks Strayan.

Divine Angel said:

kii said:

Oh, M-u-u-u-m!

I like that she speaks Strayan.

Yep. We have foreign language lessons on Wednesday mornings.

Slightly off topic.

My cat is an indoor cat, and because he spends a lot of time at the windows watching the birds he has learn’t to talk bird language. That’s OK, but I was rather startled just a couple of days ago to hear a dog barking in the tree above me. It wasn’t a dog, it was one of our two local crows, who by the way happen to be vegetarians, barking like a dog.

Divine Angel said:

My dog knows names, for example if I say Mr Mutant’s name, she’ll go looking for him. Or if we’re in the car, she’s quite antsy until I say “we’re going to see Ro” and then she knows where we’re going and she calms down.

Unfortunately she’s yet to understand, “You have to step OVER the power cord to the fan”.

You probably need to associate one or two words with that, and some practice

In general conversation with my wife we have to use code words for “walk” or our kelpie will jump up and sit by the door expecting to be taken for a walk.

I’ve seen studies that show that dogs have a vocab of 1 – 200 words.

Then there is The genius dog with a 1,022-word vocabulary

Ian said:

I’ve seen studies that show that dogs have a vocab of 1 – 200 words.

Then there is The genius dog with a 1,022-word vocabulary

>The authors of the study, says U.S. News, “admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1,022 toys better than they could.”

Clever dog but I wonder if that’s the only game she ever gets to play with those toys.