• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Dogs Can “Talk” To Us By Stringing Words Together

December 10, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Having lived alongside humans since the Ice Age, dogs have unsurprisingly picked up a few of our tricks, with a knack for communication being among their top talents. According to new research, these conversational skills may be significantly more advanced than we previously thought, as some dogs appear able to combine multiple words in order to express themselves.

In Dean Koontz’s 1987 cult classic horror novel Watchers, a super-smart genetically modified golden retriever named Einstein develops the ability to talk to people by selecting printed words from a list. Take away the book’s sci-fi/fantasy element and multiple horrific deaths, and you’ve got an idea of how this new study went down.

Advertisement

While nowhere near as intelligent as Einstein (who also knows how to grab his owner a cold beer from the fridge), the 152 dogs who took part in the research were all trained by their owners to use soundboards, whereby buttons can be pressed to produce pre-recorded words or phrases. The study authors – three of whom have ties to the company that makes these soundboards – sought to determine if dogs deliberately choose which buttons to press, or if their selections are entirely random and accidental.

Dog owners were therefore asked to track the buttons pressed by their pets over a period of 21 months, leaving the researchers with nearly 195,000 soundboard interactions to analyze.

“The findings reveal that dogs are pressing buttons purposefully to express their desires and needs,” explained study author Federico Rossano in a statement. “When dogs combine two buttons, these sequences are not random but instead seem to reflect specific requests.”

Across all dogs, the most commonly selected single words or phrases included “food”, “treat”, and “go outside”. Interestingly, certain two-word combinations also appeared more often than would be expected by chance.

Advertisement

The most frequent of these were “food” + “treat”, and “own name” + “want”. What’s particularly striking here is that the latter pair was among the most popular combinations despite the fact that, individually, these two buttons were among the least frequently pressed.

Other meaningful combinations included “food” + “water” and “go outside” + “potty”, both of which were selected as pairs more often than would occur if the dogs were just randomly pressing buttons. 

“Therefore, our findings propose that dogs are differentiating between at least some of the buttons provided on their soundboards and, given the emergence of particular two-button concept combinations at the population level, that at least some dogs have associatively ascribed different meanings to different buttons,” write the study authors.

Further analysis revealed that dogs do not appear to be simply copying their owners’ use of the soundboards, as the animals’ word selections differ greatly from those of their human companions. For instance, owners tended to select the “I love you” button much more often than their pets, who clearly have other things on their minds.

Advertisement

“While dogs already communicate some of these needs, soundboards could allow for more precise communication,” said Rossano. “Instead of barking or scratching at the door, a dog may be able to tell you exactly what it wants, even combining concepts like ‘outside’ and ‘park’ or ‘beach.’ This could improve companionship and strengthen the bond between dogs and their owners.”

Hoping to take things to the next level, Rossano revealed that the team is planning to examine whether dogs can use soundboards to creatively combine words in order to communicate abstract concepts. “We want to know if dogs can use these soundboards to express ideas beyond their immediate needs, like absent objects, past experiences, or future events,” the researcher said. 

“If they can, it would drastically change how we think about animal intelligence and communication.”

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Lacking Company, A Dolphin In The Baltic Is Talking To Himself

Source Link: Dogs Can "Talk" To Us By Stringing Words Together

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Unambiguous Signal” To Curb Emissions Now: Long-Lost Aerial Photos Reveal Evolution Of Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse
  • 8 Children Have Been Born With 3 Biological Parents Each After Mitochondrial Transfer
  • First Known Observations Of Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry In Special Particle Decay
  • In 1973, NASA Sent Two Spiders Into Space To See If They Can Spin Webs – And They Learnt A Lot
  • Meet The Many Species Of Freaky Looking “Assassin Spiders” That Only Eat Other Spiders
  • Your Dog’s TV Preferences Might Reveal Their Personality
  • Some Human Gut Bacteria Can Absorb Harmful Toxic “Forever Chemicals” So They Can Be Pooped Out
  • You Could Float Through 10 Countries Before The World’s Most International River Spat You Out
  • Enormous Coronal Hole And Beast-Like Crawling Prominences Dazzle On The Active Sun
  • Dramatic Drone Footage Of Iceland’s Latest Volcanic Eruption Shows An Epic Scene From Hell
  • A Shrimp That Lives In A Tree? Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains Are Home To Some Seriously Strange Wildlife
  • Is NASA’s Claim That Saturn Could Float On Water Really True?
  • Pangea Proxima: This Is What Planet Earth May Look Like 250 Million Years In The Future
  • The Story Of Dogxim, The Fox-Dog Hybrid That Shouldn’t Have Existed
  • Neanderthal Butchers From Different Caves Had Their Own Specialities
  • On July 20, The US And Canada Will Witness The Little-Known Seven Sisters Eclipse
  • First-Ever Giant Ichthyosaur Soft Tissues Preserved In “Extraordinary Fossil” Dating Back 183 Million Years
  • The Worst Day In History For Humans
  • Could You Survive Being Sucked Into A Tornado?
  • AI Aliens: What If Extraterrestrial Life Is Artificially Intelligent?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version