A new study says yes - and that dogs picture the object in their minds when they hear its name, much like human beings.
This border collie named Rohan was part of the study out of Budapest.
Researchers at Eotvos Lorand University measured her brain activity, as her owner said words for objects she knew.
Marianna Boros co-authored the study.
"Dogs came to the lab and did not just listen to something that was not important for them but they came with their own toys that they usually play with and what happened during the experiment is that the owner showed the toy and then put it away and then showed another toy and put it away..."
18 dogs participated in the study.
In some cases, the owners would present the dog with an object that matched the word.
In other cases, the object didn't match.
The results showed that there was a different pattern in the dogs' brains when the words matched the objects compared to when they didn't - just like humans.
BOROS: "There has been a long debate on a non-human animal's ability to understand words referentially // Understanding the meaning of the word would mean that there is a so-called memory of that object in the dog's mind, we call it a mental representation in psychology, and hearing the world would activate this mental representation in the dog's mind."
Boros said the study is the first to claim the ability to understand referential language is present across the species.
The researchers plan to examine if this ability is specific to dogs or might be present in other mammals as well.
