When a dog follows a command or fetches a ball, it’s hard to know what’s really going on inside its canine cranium. Do dogs understand and respond to tone of voice, the syllables of words, accompanying hand motions and body language, or just the situational context? Behavioral studies have offered some clues, but new research brings additional evidence that our favorite furry friends really do grasp the meaning behind words.
Dogs show a pattern of neural activity that seems to indicate they can differentiate between words for different objects, and are even surprised when presented with words and objects that don’t match up, according to a study published March 22 in the journal Current Biology. A team of neuroscientists and animal behavior researchers used non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) testing to measure the electrical pulses inside 27 pet dogs’ brains during an experiment involving the dogs’ owners and some well-loved toys. They found an electrical impulse pattern similar to a known signal in humans. The findings shed light on canine noggins and also add to our knowledge of the origins of complex language.
“It’s wonderful to have studies like this,” says Ellen Lau, a neuroscientist studying linguistics at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the new research. Applying EEG to dogs, instead of the more invasive techniques that are often used to study animal brains, allows for more direct comparisons between humans and non-humans, she explains. “If we want to understand what’s common across humans and animals, we need to have more of this kind of data.”
A vocabulary test for babies, adapted to dogs
Among animals, family pups are unique for how much exposure they get to human language. “You can probe a lot of interesting questions about language experience with dogs, because they’re some of the only animals…
Read the full article here