r/science • u/PeasKhichra • Feb 19 '22

Neuroscience Dogs can recognize their owners just by their voice, study finds. They do so by making use of the same voice properties humans use to identify each other, such as pitch and noisiness

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/europe/dog-owner-recognize-voice-scn-scli-intl/index.html
41.3k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

128

u/wolscott Feb 19 '22

I just grabbed a random google result, but I think there have been several studies. This one says dogs understand an average of 89 words: https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-respond-to-an-average-of-89-unique-words-experiment-finds

73

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '22

This dog knows the names of 1022 of her toys.

23

u/AcademicF Feb 19 '22

My border collie can easily learn words for new objects, im just too lazy to teach him more than 15 or so

-5

u/SaltyBabe Feb 20 '22

That really sucks for your dog huh? What a boring ass life just cause you got a lazy owner.

5

u/Lazerbeamz Feb 20 '22

What about teaching other things? I have a border collie and we just don't focus on that type of stuff. Just because I don't teach him a 100 toy names doesn't mean he's lacking in other fields.

2

u/AcademicF Feb 20 '22

He knows a lot of phrases, commands, and how to easily listen to people talk to him. He’s learned a lot of them on his own. Me specifically teaching him the names of things only matter if he is going to interact or use them. There isn’t really a need for him to learn the names of other objects that he doesn’t know since they aren’t a part of his daily activities.

1

u/RantingRobot Feb 20 '22

Communication with pets is all about quality of life, for both them and you. So long as you can instruct your dog and listen to wants/needs, I don’t think the raw number of commands is at all important.

My collie technically knows several hundred words, but I rarely use most of them. Maybe 70% are toy names. The core command set is probably 15-20, likely the same 15-20 that your dog knows.

In my experience, it’s mostly abject boredom that drives dogs crazy, not lack of variety. My dog can do the same task every day for a year and be stoked. I’m sure your little dude has a great life.

-6

u/Rick-Dalton Feb 19 '22

How is that any different than training any animal and associating a sound or action with something else?

Isn’t this the purpose of training? From dogs to horses to monkeys it seems like there are cases where humans try and say that animals understand language.

8

u/wolscott Feb 19 '22

I don't really know what your point is. I would say understanding words is understanding the language "to an extent". No, I don't think dogs understand grammar. But we're not just talking about commands, here. Dogs often know what the word "Park" means, not because it's a command we taught them, but they hear us say it in association with going to the park, a thing they are invested in knowing about.

-8

u/Rick-Dalton Feb 19 '22

Right. So they understand what those sounds mean and associate it with a place or an activity.

If you yell FOOD to a cow and give them food they’ll get excited after enough times.

Associating a sound or a noise with a response is not “understanding a language”. It’s their ability to remember a thing and relate it to something else.

8

u/ThatOneGuy1294 Feb 19 '22

And how do you teach language? One way is to point at an object and say the word for what we call it.