Do dogs understand verbal commands?
Khalil Turcotte
2025-07-11 05:46:31
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Most dog owners will admit that they talk freely to their dogs, and their dogs always seem to appreciate their thoughts. But even the most intelligent dogs in the world don't really understand everything their humans say. Even if your dog never fully grasps most of what you tell them, most dogs can learn quite a few verbal commands. Experts have studied dogs to know whether they grasp the meaning of words or if they respond to the tone of voice and context clues. Some experts in dog behavior estimate that the average dog has intelligence similar to that of a human toddler, like a 2-year-old child, dogs can understand between 100 and 200 words. They recognize the words in verbal commands as well as commands that are given with physical gestures. Experts find that dogs recognize important words, in some cases, the dog responds to the word itself, in other cases, dogs recognize the tone of voice and body language humans use as well as the words. Dogs might not have a perfect understanding of command words, but they understand the basic sound of important words. In one study, researchers found that dogs respond the same way to nonsense words that sound like familiar command words.
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.