Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs

Understanding the names of individual entities nonetheless assumes that dogs have to evoke the mental representation of the object upon hearing its name and thus link the two in a referential manner.

This study identifies a dog ERP component that reflects semantic expectations, thus providing the first neural evidence for object word understanding in a non-human species. The discovery of this capacity in dogs informs theoretical work on language evolution and semantics by revealing that the appreciation of referentiality during lexical processing is not a distinctive feature of human language use.