Can dogs ‘talk’ to humans? A UC San Diego study offers an intriguing clue

They’re quite smart, highly social and very expressive. Does this mean that dogs might have an unrealized ability to, in effect, directly talk to humans?

A new study by UC San Diego and the school’s collaborators suggests there’s more reason than ever to pursue the question.

In a paper published in August in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers say that dogs trained with soundboard buttons were able to understand specific recorded words like “play” and “outside,” and in the context they were spoken. They could do so without physical or verbal cues.

“The dogs did the appropriate thing in response to hearing the word,” said Federico Rossano, a UCSD cognitive scientist and the senior author on the paper.

“It is a first step toward being able to assess whether dogs understand what they’re doing when they press those buttons,” he said.

Rossano was referring to simple and widely available soundboards that typically have round buttons with a word or symbol on top. The buttons play a pre-recorded word when pressed.

In recent years, many every day people have been training their dogs to use the soundboards, repeatedly exposing animals to a variety of words. In some cases, the dogs will press a button after being asked a question by a person, such as, “Do you want to go outside?”

In other instances, the dogs will press a button without being prompted, seeming to express a conscious interest or desire.

Many people take videos of the dog’s behavior and post them on YouTube, TikTok and other social media sites, where they have been generating enormous interest. Some videos say or imply that dogs are basically talking to people when they press the sound buttons, a claim that bothers scientists, who say that the animals are typically responding to physical or verbal queues.

The UCSD-led study involved scientific rigor.

In one experiment, researchers visited the homes of 30 dogs across the country to examine their response to soundboard button recordings. The scientists avoided placing the dogs in situations where they could pick up a cue about how to respond.

In another experiment, “citizen scientists” did the same thing with 29 dogs in a home setting. The participants were under remote guidance from the research team.

Both experiments involved many breeds of dogs, ranging from beagles and golden retrievers to poodles and terriers.

The experiments were part of broader efforts by UCSD’s Comparative Cognition Lab and other institutions around the world to better understand how and what dogs comprehend and communicate. Some of the ongoing work involves examining every button a dog presses in the hopes that it reveals something useful, especially about the animal’s health.

“We do see dogs using buttons in ways that suggest that they are upset, or happy, or frustrated or excited,” said Rossano, who appears in “Inside the Mind of a Dog,” a documentary now playing on Netflix.

“My hope is not just to learn something about their mind, but something that is also beneficial for the animals,” he said.