Science Questions

Do dogs understand language? Tony, Westcliffe

There is a very famous dog, a German Shepherd called Rico who has been written about in the journal ‘Science’ as having a registered vocabulary of 240 words.  Rico’s owners demonstrated that he has the learning abilities of a 5 year old by showing context specific learning and attribution.  By putting Rico in one room and a number of his toys in another room, and then asking him to retrieve one by name, he would get the right toy.  He was then told to go and fetch an item he had never seen or heard of, and was able to pick this object out by a process of elimination as he knew the names of all the other objects in the room.

So yes, dogs can have a vocabulary, and therefore can understand some language, and probably use a similar region of their brain to that which we use for language.

June 2007