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New Study Explores How Dogs Understand Human Language

If you’re a dog person who has suspected that your four-legged friend may know exactly what you mean when you use certain words or phrases—for example “toy,” or “car,” or maybe even “who’s the good boy?” (he is)—you may be correct. A new study by scientists at Emory University and published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience suggests dogs possess a basic understanding of the words they’ve been taught to associate with objects. After training 12 very good dogs of different breeds over the course of two to six months to discern between two toys based on their respective names, the researchers then utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study whether they possessed a basic ability to differentiate between human speech they were taught to remember and new or unfamiliar words. “Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that,” Ashley Prichard, a Ph.D. candidate in