From barking to talking: Can dogs talk to humans?

By Daniëlle Aben

Over the past few years, soundboards for pets, with buttons that each produce a unique word, have become more and more popular. These are mostly used by dog owners, through which the owner can communicate with their pet. A collaborative study by several Universities in America studies if dogs can really associate human words to different outcomes. They showed that dogs are in fact able to rightly associate words of the human language to their meaning. 

The use of Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC), communication between individuals of different species, has increased since the invention of soundboards. A lot of pet owners buy one, on which they can record words and assign them each to a specific button on the board. 

Owners can train their pet by pushing a button and then showing the outcome. After repeating this a few times, pets can learn to press the button themselves. Using soundboards for pets could improve AIC between pets and their owners, which could give them more control over their lives. In turn, this could improve the wellbeing of pets. 

In the collaborative study, researchers looked into food-, play-, and outside-related words. The experiment was done by looking if dogs behaved in an anticipatively way of the word. For example, upon the word ‘play’ a dog should be more likely to walk to their toy box than their food container. Any additional contextual cues were removed, such as using food-related words around the usual dinner time, and owners having to wear sunglasses to make sure any response was purely due to the word itself. 

Besides these word-categories, they studied if there was a difference in ability to associate words when performed by a familiar or unfamiliar person. Lastly, they looked into potential different reactions to either producing the word by pressing the button or it being spoken by the owner. 

The results from the study show that dogs are truly able to rightly associate words of a soundboard to their consequence, regardless of who pushed the buttons when it came to play- or outside-related words. They didn’t find these results for the food-related words. In addition, there were no differences in reactions when the owner or an unfamiliar person pushed a button. However, the study did not look into the effect of intonation of the words on the reaction of the dogs. It might be that dogs would respond differently when words are spoken in a monotone way. 

Thus, it turns out dogs can understand some of the human language when being taught and although they can’t speak it themselves, they can use it indirectly to communicate with humans. So, one could say we can finally talk with dogs, which can lead to the improvement of their welfare.