by M. Morrison

Created on: August 06, 2009

If you don't know one personally, you've at least seen someone who believes their dog can understand English, but is it true; can dogs really understand human language? To an extent, yes - they come to learn verbal commands and sometimes even words we don't really mean to teach them (like the dreaded 'bath'). Despite their ability to learn certain words, however, it's doubtful that their understanding goes as deep as some people give them credit for. It's not that they understand our language, exactly, but rather that they've come to associate certain sounds with a meaning, as was demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s. A bell was rang just before the dog was given food; after a few repetitions, the dog began to salivate at the sound of the bell, regardless of whether it saw food or not. The dog had learned that the bell meant food. This is, essentially, how dogs "learn our language".

Dogs communicate with each other in a variety of ways; they mark their territory with their scent, read body language, and use a variety of sounds to say "go away" or "come play". They don't rely on spoken language the same way we do - they're limited to a few different barks, yips, whines, and growls, whereas we have hundreds of thousands of words to choose from, never mind what they mean when used in different contexts. To a dog, raised hackles simply mean "stay away" - there's no wondering whether it was meant jokingly or sarcastically, or if it means more than one thing. It doesn't think about things the same way we do - it sees something and determines whether or not it's a threat, and reacts accordingly. This is where association comes in.

We teach our dogs how to behave through our own actions. If our dog is misbehaving and we call it back only to punish it, it's going to associate the punishment with the command rather than its trouble-making, and will be less likely to come the next time it's called. Likewise, if we pet and coddle our dog when it's afraid, it will learn that good things come from showing fear. This association is how dogs learn what auditory commands and hand signals mean, and it's what reinforces their obedience. We say "sit", push its behind down to show it what we want, and then praise. Eventually it will sit on its own when it hears "sit", and again we praise, to encourage it to continue this behaviour. It isn't that the dog knows that "sit" means to sit down, but that a sound has been associated with an action and reinforcement - you could substitute "sit" with "turkey" and get the same result. We know that a turkey is a bird, but a dog only knows what it's taught. When you hear someone speaking in an unfamiliar foreign language, do those words mean anything to you? No; it's just a series of sounds. To a dog, any human language is a foreign language, and all of it is just a series of sounds.

Dogs are intelligent and eager to learn, but they don't think the same way we do. The same principle of association is used every day with humans, but the difference is in how we learn language. You can tell a person to sit and then mime the action or show them a picture of a person sitting, and they might mimic it, but if you try that with a dog, it's probably just going to stand there with no clue as to what you're doing or what you want. It's true that dogs can be taught to understand commands or to identify objects, but they're probably never going to understand complete sentences. To a dog, a word without an association is just a noise.

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