dogs understand words

Dogs can tell how toys work without training

/ susanbulanda / Leave a comment

What this means is that dogs can group objects by how they are used, not by how they look. The importance of this discovery shows that dogs understand words and in a more flexible manner than previously thought.

A team of animal behavior researchers worked with dog owners and had them play with their dogs with objects in two categories, pull and fetch. The owners used these words with specific toys that did not look similar.

“Next, the dogs were tested to see if they had learned to connect the functional labels to the correct group of toys before playing with more novel toys in the two distinct categories. However, this time, their owners didn’t use the “pull” and “fetch” labels for the dogs.

The team found that the dogs were able to extend the functional labels they’d learned previously to the new toys based on their experience playing with them. In the final test, the dogs showed that they could successfully apply the verbal labels to the toys by either pulling or fetching accordingly, even when their owners hadn’t named them.”

This impacts the way we train our dogs and the importance of the words that we use, especially associating the words with actions. If dogs are capable of understanding words to this level, it is reasonable to assume that other animals and birds can do the same thing.

Journal Reference:

  1. Claudia Fugazza, Andrea Sommese, Ádám Miklósi. Dogs extend verbal labels for functional classification of objects. Current Biology, 2025; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.013

Cite This Page:

Cell Press. “Dogs can tell how toys work without any training.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 September 2025. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250923021212.htm>.

Dogs Can Understand Vocabulary and the Intonation of Human Speech

/ susanbulanda / 2 Comments

The world was amazed by the accomplishments of Chaser the Border Collie. Chaser can identify 1022 toys by their name and retrieve them by category.

She also knows common nouns such as house, ball, and tree. What is more amazing is that she can learn new words by inferential reasoning by exclusion.

This means she can pick out an object that she has not been taught the name of by eliminating all the objects she knows.  She also understands sentences with multiple elements and has learned by imitation.

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Border Collie “Ness”

Scientists have shown that Chaser is not unique in her ability to do these things. They have discovered that dogs understand both vocabulary and intonation of human speech using their left brain the same as people do. Prior to this research, it was thought that understanding words and intonations was something only humans could do, but that is not the case. The study also showed that dogs, like people, process words separately from intonation.

This is exciting because it shows us that our dogs (and possibly other animals) are far better able to understand what we say than many people realize. It also expands the horizon as far as how and what we can train our dogs to do.

However, does this mean that if we want to hide something from our dogs that we are talking about we will have to spell out the word? I can only imagine the conversation, “You know I made a v-e-t appointment for R-o-v-e-r for tomorrow.”