Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

When Alexis Devine was having a tough time one day, her sheepadoodle dog named Bunny consoled her — just not in a way that most people might expect. 

"I was talking to my partner over FaceTime and I was crying … and Bunny pressed 'no.' I wasn't looking at her, I was just engaged in the conversation," said Devine. 

After what seemed like a plea from Bunny for her to not cry, Devine said, "There was a pause, and then she pressed 'love you.'" 

Bunny communicates to Devine, the author of I Am Bunny, through a soundboard device — a floor placemat with pressable buttons for dogs that play pre-recorded words out loud. To date, Devine says Bunny can "speak" about 100 words. 

On TikTok, Bunny's prowess delights over 8.5 million followers, and she is among many other pet dogs on the video-sharing platform — Oski the pug, Copper the Lab, Flambo the Aussie — who are shown to communicate with their owners using soundboards. 

As a researcher whose interests include the cognitive abilities of different species, the rise of "talking" dogs further piqued the interests of Federico Rossano, an associate professor in the department of cognitive sciences at the University of California, San Diego. 

"My next reaction was like, somebody should study it because I think once you have hundreds, thousands of people doing this [online], we should know what's going on," Rossano, who also leads the Comparative Cognition Lab at his university, told The Current's Matt Galloway.  

Published in the journal PLOS ONE last month, Rossano's findings suggest dogs in the study were able to understand certain words, contributing to the possibility of an enhanced bond between dogs and their owners. 

As a dog owner, Devine says the results aren't unexpected.

"I think it's not a surprise to anyone who lives with dogs that they can make associations with objects and words." 

To investigate whether dogs trained to use soundboards actually understand the words that are played when a button is pressed, Rossano and his colleagues conducted two controlled experiments with 59 dogs. 

The researchers aimed to rule out variables such as a dog responding to their owner's cues — like, the owner putting on shoes to go outside — the identity of the human saying the word, or memorizing the location of buttons on the board. 

"Part of the new idea or challenge here was that, very often, you might think that the dog understands the word 'treat.' But really what the dog sees is you moving towards the cupboard and opening [it]," said Rossano. 

"We wanted to show that this animal is actually paying attention to the words, the sounds."