Dog Brains Reveal How Much Human Language They Actually Understand

We love to tell dogs what to do, but we rarely consider whether they understand what we’re saying. Pet owners assume their dogs comprehend commands like sit, stay, or heel — even play dead and make me Instagram famous, for that matter — but without the ability to read their minds, no one can know for sure. An ingenious new study in Frontiers in Neuroscience, however, finds a way to determine which of our commands they actually understand.

The fact that we can teach dogs tricks makes it obvious that, at a basic level, they can discriminate words from non-words. But in the new paper, published Monday, the objective was to figure out what actually happens in a dog’s brain when it hears its owner’s command.

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