Ratcliffe brought 250 dogs into her lab, and tested each one by putting a speaker on either side of each dog’s head and playing the command “to come” out of both speakers. To learn this, Victoria Ratcliffe, a grad student at the University of Sussex in England, set up a great experiment to determine whether dogs can discern meaningful words from gibberish–no more “blah, blah, blah, Ginger!” And they process that information in a different part of the brain from where they process emotional cues in speech. Psychologists reported Wednesday in the journal Current Biology that dogs do pay attention to the meanings of words. Now science has shown what many of us know: in addition to listening for tone (friendly or mean), how the pitch goes up or down and even the rhythms in our speech, our dogs really do understand what we’re saying. Our Princess Pooch, for example, has a wide vocabulary she knows all our other pets’ names, recognizes the difference between “ball” and “bone,” and is so focused on the words “pool,” “swimming” “outside,” and “bed” that we often resort to spelling them so she can’t anticipate what we’re going to do. While this cartoon always makes me laugh, I’ve long doubted it’s an accurate representation. In one of my favorite Far Side cartoons, Gary Larson tells us our dog’s vocabulary is rather limited in fact, they really only know or hear their names.
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