• Question: Do dogs and cats truely understand human speech? And would they understand different languages?

    Asked by fc12carter12 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 22 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      Dogs and cats have been close to people for many many years and they are very good at picking up clues fróm our behaviour, which can give us the impression that they truly understand us but in fact they don’t understand human speech the way we understand it. They are able to connect some sounds with certain meanings, for instance the sound “seat” with us wanting them to seat down, but they never truly learn the meaning of the word “seat”, they simply learnt at some point to connect one thing with the other, usually because they initially got a treat out of doing it. There is also a limit to the number of sounds that they can learn, though dogs can be trained to understand more than 100 words or gestures, which is very impressive! Dogs and cats are also not capable of learning the meaning of words like “sad” or “love” – they could learn how to relate the word “sad” with the fact that you’re not playing with them that day but they wouldn’t know that sad means (even though they might also feel it).

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Dogs learn many more words than cats do, because they are cooperative animals that work directly with us. I remember one of my friends who was Mexican feeling silly because she spoke to a Scottish cat in English! The cat mostly “understood” when it was getting fed. Anyway, dogs can learn in any language: here’s a dog that knows 1000 words in English http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12067099 Here’s another dog that knows German words http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3794079.stm But no non-human animal has been shown to be able to build complicated sentences that go on and on like this one just did. The most they can usually do is sentences like this: “find the red box” “feed me grape”.

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Hiya,
      For sure dogs and cats are very good at reading our behaviour, and when we speak, the tone of our voice conveys a lot of information so even if they do no understand the meaning of the words, they can understand the emotions being conveyed. Therefore I think a dog would understand, say, the emotions of a person speaking French and English equally well. Don’t forget they also have great senses of smell, and from that they can often smell if we are stressed or sick for example.

      Of course they can also learn to associate particular sounds with actions (e.g. My parents’ dog knows “Walkies” means time for fun outside!)… So in that sense they will learn words from a particular language.

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