dɔgz ənd fənetɪks

If you own a dog long enough you may become one of those people who is constantly claiming 'oh my dog is so smart he understands everything I say' but does your dog really know what you're talking about? If you asked him or her to run /rən / to the bottom of the garden roll /roʊl/twice and then sit /sɪt/and wait /weɪt /there, they would just sit there on the spot where you said sit and wait. But why? If a dog can understand you as you are saying, actually comprehend the English language surely it should be no problem. Well I am sorry to burst your bubble but what they can understand, are the phonetics.

 

A dogs hearing is considerably more powerful than a humans so you can assume that sound is very important to a dog and phonetics are all about sound. Ask a dog to sit enough times and eventually they will do the action you are training them to do upon hearing this arrangement of sounds and it is all in the sounds, you could train a dog to jump /dʒəmp/to the word sit and /sɪt/ to the word jump, if they understood the word the dog would Jump if asked to jump, no matter how bizarrely you have trained it.

 

I will however admit that they associate certain words with a strong memory or emotion, which could come across as an understanding. If I say vet in front of my dog he will put his tail between his legs and slink off behind a sofa. He doesn't know what the word means but he knows that that order of sounds means it is time to go to some horrible place, I get the same reaction if I say that 'we have been to the vets', he picked up on the sounds of the lexeme vet. If he understood English he would know he had nothing to worry about as it was all in the past tense.  

 

There is the case of chaser a border collie that learnt 1000 words, all of which were a different name for a toy. It looks very impressive saying get a toy and the dog coming back with one of the ten toys but this is much the same as saying fetch, just with a different order of sounds. The dog knows that the sounds for /bɔl /means a different object to the sounds for/boʊn/, however say bring me the rugby, golf or football /rəgbi/gɑlf//fʊtˌbɔl/ and you will notice that most of the time the dog will pick the first ball it sees. However train a dog to understand post modifiers such as 'bring me the large green ball', the dog would have to distinguish between two balls which are green then would have to know which is large and which is small. That would show them starting to understand our language

 

So does your dog really understand what you are saying to them?

 
Conor Shields