Cassandra Wuerstle, News Editor

Emory Universities school of Health and Science is researching how dogs interpret words. The researchers have set out to determine if dogs can associate words with objects or if they are merely reacting to the stimuli related to the word. The researchers  Ashley Prichard, a PhD candidate and Gregory Berns, the Senior Author of the study, have been making headway in the science community for their work with mans best friend. It was Berns and his colleagues who trained the first dogs to enter fMRI machines voluntarily.

In a previous study done by Berns and Pritchard dogs who were MRIed proved to have a basic understanding of words they have been trained to react to. But the question remained, do dogs actually have a conceptualization of words or are they responding to other associated stimuli.

The researchers at Emory took an in-depth look at the brain mechanisms dogs use to differentiate between and identify words. "Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn't much scientific evidence to support that," says Pritchard.

In the new study, Pritchard and Berns evaluated 12 separate breeds of dogs who were trained to retrieve 2 objects, “monkey” and  “Piggy”. The two objects varied in texture one soft the other hard to create a distinct difference in the objects. The dogs were concerned officially trained if they could fetch the correct toy when told to fetch one with the other present in the room.

Once they were considered officially trained, they were put through two different sets of experiments. Half of the dogs were placed in the fMRI scanner while owners stood in front of them and said “monkey” or “Piggy”, then showed them that specific toy.

To establish a base, owners ran through the procedure but added one step. They added nonsense words like "bobbu" and "bodmick," then held up random objects like a hat or a doll. This allowed the researchers to see differences in the brain when dogs were presented with words they knew and nonsense word.

The imaging showed that there was greater activation in the listening regions of the brain when dogs listened to nonsense words rather than trained words. The presumed reason for this is that dogs show more neural activation in nonsense words because they want to understand them, and what their owners are expressing to them.

These results show that dogs and humans think differently when interpreting words. When dogs are given nonsense words, their brain activates at higher rates, whereas humans show higher activation rates when presented with words they know.

The results of the study were mixed, various dogs had different regions of the brain activate when presented with novel words vs nonsense words.  This may be caused by the different breeds, ages, and sizes of the dogs.

However, the research does support that dogs understand human words when appropriately trained and that their understanding goes beyond the basic Pavlovian response. Prichard and Berns's other research conducted suggests that dogs are more apt to learn from visual and scent cues than verbal. So while dogs can be taught to understand human words on deeper levels, they still learn better with other language cues.