How to know if your dog understands what you’re saying

I confess. I sometimes have full conversations with my Border Collie.

I mean, we all talk to our dogs, but you have to wonder: Are they hearing our words or just how they sound? Certainly, “good dog” comes out sounding a lot different than “no” or “sit.”

And why does your dog sometimes cock his head to the left or right when you talk to him? Could that have some meaning aside from just wanting to hear you better?

A graduate student in England wanted to know what all this canine body language meant. Do dogs have a vocabulary, or are they just really good at figuring out what we say to them based on the tone of our voice?

So she set up a big experiment with 250 dogs (hopefully not all at once!) by placing a speaker near each dog’s ear.

She found a pattern of head turning, either toward the left or right speaker. The dogs turned to the right when they heard a familiar command, and to the left when they heard just an emotional “cue.”

For the emotional only voice inflections, sometimes the words were just gibberish. So it soon became apparent that the words the dogs clearly understood the meaning of resulted in that right head turn.

Canine experts interpreted this to mean that your dog processes words on two different sides of his brain. One side works for the words he understands and the other for “emotional” words he’s trying to figure out.

And that, they say isn’t as crazy as it sounds, but similar to the way we humans respond to words too.

If anything helpful came out of this big doggie discovery study, it may be that when your dog cocks his head to the right when you say something to him, he knows exactly what you mean.

Now if we could just get our husbands to do the same thing ☺

Sources:
“How dogs understand what we say” Michaeleen Doucleff, November 28, 2014, NPR, npr.org