Humans can communicate various instructions to dogs without using actual words—simply by modulating the tone of their voice, a new study from ELTE University’s Department of Ethology shows. By repeating the nonsense syllable ‘bü’ in different intonations, humans successfully signaled “Yes,” “No,” “Here,” and “There” and, remarkably, dogs responded correctly, despite receiving no prior training. The findings reveal ancient acoustic codes, interpretable across species, that predate language itself. The study was published in Cognition.
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Yea, pretty confident that the current understanding in animal behavior and psychology, as it relates to dogs, is that they don’t comprehend words. It’s all just noise. You can cue a dog to perform a behavior with any noise, or easier yet, no noise and just a hand signal. Dogs respond better to hand signals than verbal ones, fun fact. When you’re instilling a new behavior, best practice is to add the verbal cue only after the dog has sufficiently learned the behavior
Now do cats!
Yea, not as well educated as far as cat training goes, but you can train any animal the same way, Pavlov’s classical conditioning. You can even train butterflies to fly between two points with the technique! Very cool