• Question: Can animals understand (at least part of) what we are saying?

    Asked by alevy42 on 8 Jan 2018. This question was also asked by dylan1066.
    • Photo: Nadine Lavan

      Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      It’s really difficult to assess how much animals can actually understand because they obviously can’t directly tell us! We do, however, know for example that dogs can understand the tone of voice of a human: they will know whether you are telling them off or whether you are happy with what they’ve done. In the Christmas Lectures we’ve also seen that dogs can learn which spoken words go with which toy, so there is some capacity to map sounds to objects – but whether that involves an abstract understanding of the word remains to be seen (e.g. if a dog learnt to associate the word for “hippo” with its green hippo toy, would it be able to also know that a different, red hippo toy is in the same category?).

    • Photo: Daniel Mills

      Daniel Mills answered on 10 Jan 2018:

      This is a question we have been looking at in relation to dogs over the years. Dogs understanding of language seems to be very different to ours even though they can seem to respond in very human like ways and seem to understand. the reality is they are often picking up on other cues. For example- very few dogs actually understand the word “sit”, and if you want to test this, try lying spread-eagled, face down in a room with your dog wandering around and say sit without making any eye contact or moving. Very few dogs will sit first time in response to this command because they have never experienced the word in this context. often they use cues like our body language rather than the word- most people lean forward or point as they say “sit”. also our work indicates that dogs seem to understand objects largely in terms of what they do with them rather than their physical properties so unless you train them to discriminate two objects if they have to fetch them both they may get confused. its a fascinating area of research

    • Photo: Wendy M. Grossman

      Wendy M. Grossman answered on 12 Jan 2018:

      Obviously many of the animals we live with do understand at least some things – if you said the word “beach” in my friend’s dog’s hearing it would go bananas running back and forth in the expectation of being taken there. Often, what they understand isn’t words, of course: even a goldfish can recognize its owner and swim to the edge of the tank expecting food, and cats are very smart about figuring out how to indicate that they are hungry.

      wg

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