Your Dog May Not Understand English, But The Good Boy Is Working Very Hard To Learn A Few Words

Most dog owners are like couples with a kid. Aside from engaging in the same gross over usage of baby talk, they also believe their dog (or baby) is smarter than every other.

For one, they tend to insist their dog understands them, and they might just be right.

Images courtesy: Reuters

Scientists at Emory University studied 12 very good boys, after they trained them to associate specific words with two toys they were given. "Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn't much scientific evidence to support that," said Ashley Prichard, one of the study's authors. So, over the course of two to six months, the dogs were taught to distinguish between the two toys which were always referred to in the same manner, like "Monkey" and "Piggy".

During the study, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the dog's brains as they responded to tests involving the toys. They wanted to prove that dogs do indeed have a basic ability to differentiate between words they've been taught and new ones.

During the scan, the dogs' owners were made to stand in front of the machine, and try four methods of testing - expected, unexpected, pseudoword, and reward. The main point here is that these tests were designed for a reason. Where previous studies tested a dog's ability to grasp intonation and gestures, this tested its ability to actually recognise a word.

"We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands," said Gregory Berns, a senior author on the study. "Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures and even emotional expressions from their owners."

As it turns out, the dogs display greater brain activity when their owners called out made-up words (pseudoword test) and presented them with a toy they'd been trained to recognize. More interestingly though, when presented with a novel word they didn't know, the dogs reacted the opposite way humans do.

With people, their brain activity tends to drop if they encounter a word they don't know. For dogs however, their neural activity spikes. The researchers believe it's because the good doggos know we want them to understand us, and they're trying so very hard to please us.

If that doesn't prove dogs are too good for people, nothing will.