Do dogs understand verbal commands?
Jerod McCullough
2025-06-29 19:26:44
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Dogs don’t access phonetic details when they’re listening to human speech. Try telling your dog to “sit” or “sid” and you’ll likely get the same result: a good pup in a nice sitting posture. This means that dogs aren’t listening to or learning words in quite the same way as humans—or at least, not in the same way as adult humans. They do listen to human speech, it’s just that their attention isn’t on the phonetic details—and yet even that isn’t set in stone. There are studies that show that after some training, some dogs can differentiate similar-sounding words, so it doesn’t mean even that they don’t hear these differences, it is just that they probably don’t think that those differences are important.
Some dogs can learn hundreds of vocabulary words, and these pups are currently the subjects of another study, where they learned up to 12 new words in the space of a week, including names for toys—a category of word that dogs seem to have much more trouble picking up. We know that dogs can learn commands or cues or sound stimuli or any stimulus for a behavior, which is basically a process of association, but there was no existing research about learning the names of objects, and most dogs do not learn the name of objects. Yet the six dogs that participated in the Genius Dog Challenge were able to learn the names of objects with no training, and some dogs could learn the name of a toy after just four repetitions.