Scientists from Loránd Eötvös University (Budapest) have found that dogs do not just reflexively react to certain words that a person says, but understand the meaning of these words. The results of the study were published in the journal Current Biology.
As the authors of the work noted, a person is characterized by referential perception of words - when mental ideas are projected onto a specific word. When scientists test pre-verbal children for word comprehension, they ask them to point to or pick up an object whose name the experimenters say out loud.
It is noted that few dogs are able to correctly pass such tests. In a new study, scientists asked the owners of 18 dogs to first say the names of objects and toys familiar to their pets, and then show them. Moreover, some names coincided with the subject, and some did not. For example, the dog was told the word “ball”, but some other toy was held in his hand. Throughout testing, the animals’ brain activity was recorded using an EEG device.
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It turned out that dogs reacted differently to situations when the name of an object coincided or did not coincide with its appearance. This reaction proves that dogs understand the meaning of the words their owner says and are aware of what object is in front of them.
“Dogs don’t just respond to certain words in a learned way. They also not only associate this word with an object according to the principle of temporal contiguity (the principle according to which ideas, memories and experiences are related to each other. -
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) and without understanding the meaning of the words, but they activate their memory of the object when they hear its name,” noted Marianna Boros, an employee of the Department of Ethology at Loránd Eötvös University.
Previously, it was believed that only a few dogs were able to determine the meaning of words. For this purpose, they were specially trained, expanding their “vocabulary.” However, new research has shown that the ability to understand the meaning of words is common to all dogs.
“No matter how many object words a dog understands, the known words activate mental representations, which suggests that this ability is inherent in dogs in general, and not just in a few exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects,” she added. Borosh.
According to experts, the discovery that dogs can have the ability to perceive words in a referential way will help change the way scientists think about animal thinking, and pet owners will be able to better understand them.
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"Your dog understands more than he lets on...Dogs don't just learn to behave a certain way in response to certain words, but can actually understand the meaning of individual words, just like humans do," added Lilla Magyari, assistant professor of psychology at Loránd Eötvös University.
The authors of the study intend to find out whether other mammals have similar abilities, and also how much their development depends on the animal’s experience of living next to humans.