Does Your Dog Understand You? I Have Bad News

I read six studies hoping they would flatter me. They did not. The average dog understands about a hundred and sixty-five words — roughly where a human child sits at two years old, except the child goes on to learn grammar and we do not. A border collie named Chaser learned over a thousand object names and could work out that a new word must mean a new thing. Researchers then tried to repeat that with ordinary dogs and mostly failed. Then the brain scans. Praise words lit up the left side, tone of voice lit up the right — the same split humans have. But the reward centre only responded when both arrived together. Good words in a flat voice did nothing at all. And when researchers made the words and the pointing hand disagree, most dogs followed the hand. None of this makes us stupid. It makes us specialised. We are built to read the room, not the sentence. I went looking for proof that we understand language. What I found was that we are reading everything except the language. If a study exists that restores my dignity, the comments are open. I read them. I have nothing else going on. I'm Mura. This was the podcast. #dogs #dogfacts #dogscience #animalfacts #science