There’s nothing more captivating than a video in which Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans language. Owners talk to their dogs about their favorite words, such as “walk,” “ball,” “park,” and “food,” and the dog responds by shaking its head in an adorable way or barking excitedly. Short videos of such scenes are all over social media.
At first glance, these dogs may seem to have learned to associate certain sounds with certain outcomes. For example, “sit down” means that if you follow the instructions, you will “receive a reward.” However, this view of words as mere cues for behavior may have been just a superficial understanding of how dogs process human words and Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans. According to a recent study
published in the American scientific journal Current Biology , all dogs can visualize images from the words they hear. In other words, dogs actually appear to have a deeper understanding of language than is generally believed, in basically the Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans.
Dogs also imagine specific images from words.
A response called “N400” plays a very important role in human speech comprehension. This is the reaction that occurs in the brain approximately 400 milliseconds after a person is reading or listening to something and comes across something that does not match what would be expected from the context.
For example, if you are reading a sentence about a cat playing with a shoe and the word “apple” suddenly appears, this reaction might occur. The N400 indicates how the brain processes meanings and associations between words and concepts, and is widely accepted as a marker of human semantic processing.
What is interesting about this research is that it applied the N400 approach, which has been extensively used in humans, to Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans. The research team looked at how dogs’ brains reacted differently when presented with context-appropriate and out-of-context items.
They then observed a reaction similar to the N400 reaction in humans in dogs. When dogs heard a word that was expected to be associated with a specific object and then saw a different object, their brains responded in a unique way. This means that the dog was thinking of matching objects based on the words it heard.
What makes this discovery so groundbreaking is that dogs, much like infants before they learn language or humans after they learn language, don’t just respond to sounds or behave in a trained manner. This is the first time that this has been neurologically proven. At some level, dogs actually understand that certain words refer to specific objects in their surroundings and Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans. These results greatly deepen our understanding of how dogs process human words, and suggest that humans may not be the only ones capable of “referential understanding,” which is the ability to understand what a word refers to. do.
Breakthrough with new research method using electroencephalogram
Until now, researchers have relied on asking nonverbal subjects, such as infants and animals, to make active choices to determine whether they understand language. Specifically, this involves asking your dog the name of an object and instructing it to take it and return. However, in these experiments, the chances of a dog picking up the correct object and returning it were often no different than if they had done so by chance, and in some cases it was questionable whether the dogs really understood the words.
To further investigate how dogs understand human speech, a team of researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary took a novel approach. Rather than making judgments based on physical behavior, such as taking something and returning it, as was the case in the past, we decided to measure the dogs’ brain activity using a non-invasive technique called electroencephalography (EEG). Using EEG, we can observe the brain’s response to various stimuli without having to look at behavior.
Eighteen dogs participated in the experiment. Each owner said the name of a toy that the dog was familiar with and then showed them that toy or another toy. For example, they said, “Here’s the ball,” and then showed the dog the ball or another object, and recorded the dog’s brain activity during that time. In this way, they investigated whether the dog’s responses differed depending on whether the presented object matched the word it had heard or not.
Dogs understand language in a similar way to humans
The results revealed that dogs’ brain activity patterns differed when they were shown an object that matched the word they had heard and when they were shown an object that did not match. Interestingly, the researchers also found that this understanding ability is not limited to dogs, which have a rich vocabulary of objects. Even dogs that knew fewer words had different patterns of brain activity. This means that the ability to imagine an image from a word and understand what that word refers to is not something that only a few dogs with special training have, but is a trait that is common among dogs in general. suggests.
Rethinking traditional views on animals’ language abilities
The discovery that dogs can understand language in a similar way to humans challenges the idea that language is uniquely human. This suggests that the ability to associate words and meanings may not be unique to humans, and may have implications for theories about the evolution of language.
A surprising fact has been revealed even for dog owners. My dog can’t speak, but he actually understands words better than I expected, and instead of just following instructions, he understands the meaning of some words just like humans do. It seems like there is.
This study raises the question of whether these linguistic abilities are limited to dogs or shared by other animals. It may also have implications for our understanding of the origins of animal intelligence and communication. This research is likely to force us to reconsider the possibility of cognitive abilities and linguistic understanding in non-human species.
Must Read: CAN “TREES” GROW ON TERRESTRIAL PLANETS OUTSIDE THE SOLAR SYSTEM?