Mary Allen
Can dogs understand us? For example, do they recognize different words? Similar questions are asked not only by dog owners but also by scientists. And the dog’s speech recognition seems to be better than originally thought.
Human language is not easy. Small changes in vowels can give a word a whole new meaning. Even so, dogs can notice these small differences, as researchers in England recently found.
For their research, they chose English words that began with “h” and ended with “d”. Including “hood”, “had” and “head”. The terms were spoken and recorded by 13 men and 14 women, none of whom were familiar with the dogs in the experiment. The speakers were of different ages and spoke with different accents. The word was reproduced to the dogs several times by different speakers.
At some point, the dogs lost interest and showed no signs of attention if they continued to hear the same word. However, when playing a new word, which differed from the old only in the middle vowel, the dogs again paid attention. Researchers have studied this using video footage.
Dogs Perceive Subtle Differences in Language
Scientists have already discovered that dogs can distinguish between different commands and speakers. This study complements the results by showing that dogs can also distinguish very similar words, even with different accents.
The researchers conclude from this: Dogs recognize words independently of the speaker – and without prior training. At the same time, the result provides information on speech recognition in dogs.
This shows that dogs can distinguish subtle differences between vowel sounds. And one more thing: dogs also understand words when they are pronounced by different people with different pronunciations and tones.
However, there are limitations to this study. Because the design of the study does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about whether dogs really understand the meaning of words.
At the very least, observations show that dogs are listening to us – and at least trying to distinguish between our sounds.