Does Your Dog Understand What You Say? Apparently Not According To Recent Study

Doting pet parents are often under the impression that their doggos get them like nobody else and vice versa. But, a recent study by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest reveals that despite possessing “human-like" auditory capabilities for interpreting speech sounds, dogs can’t really tell the subtle differences between words in the way that humans do.

Researchers formed their observations based on the results gathered after using the technique of electroencephalography, which involved taping electrodes to the animals' heads. In the experiment, dogs were made to listen to recorded instruction words they were familiar with, unfamiliar with, and even outrightly bizarre terms they had no clue about.

Speaking about their inferences, lead study author Lilla Magyari said, “The brain activity is different when they listen to the instructions, which they know, and to the very different nonsense words, which means that dogs recognize these words.” The findings were published in the Royal Society Open Science journal on Tuesday.

What also needs to be noted is that the pets in question paid little heed to the small difference in the words they were familiar with and the ones they’d never heard of before. “But it seems like they don't really pay attention to all of the speech sounds," she said, adding, “They may just not realize that all details, the speech sounds, are really important in human speech. If you think of a normal dog: That dog is able to learn only a few instructions in its life.”

But, the biggest takeaway from the interesting study was that contrary to the popular notion is that dogs don’t just respond to familiar humans or body language but actually lend a listening ear to human speech!

“It really shows that dogs can differentiate the words that they know from nonsense words,” said Magyari.