Dogs Can Read, Debunking the Myth

Researchers tested 17 adult dogs of various breeds to see whether they could recognize emotional expressions in the faces and voices of humans and other dogs—an ability that's considered a higher cognitive talent because two different senses ...

H. Root-Gutteridge, A. Korzeniowska, V. Ratcliffe, D. Reby, Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) recognise meaningful content in monotonous streams of read speech. Anim. Cogn. 28, 29 (2025). ... D. Ramos, D. S. Mills, Limitations in the learning of verbal content by dogs during the training of OBJECT and ACTION commands. J. Vet. Behav. 31, 92–99 (2019). ... C. Fugazza, S. Dror, A. Sommese, A. Temesi, Á. Miklósi, Word learning dogs (Canis familiaris) provide an animal model for studying exceptional performance.

Due to the success of dogs on perspective-taking tasks, some have hypothesized that domestic dogs may have theory of mind, or the ability to infer what other individuals know. Here we provide the first evidence that nondomesticated canids, grey wolves (Canis lupus), are also sensitive to human attentional state under some conditions.

Dogs problem-solve all the time and being able to read humans’ emotional expressions, emotional states and emotionally driven behaviour is tremendously advantageous and may be seen as a highly important adaptive feature. According to Schachter and Singer (1962), the experience of emotions can induce emotional states, which are more long lasting yet less obvious occurrences that are not time constrained to emotional expressions and could be seen as a faculty of physiological arousal and cognitive processing.

Children correctly reported story elements 80% of the time and their vocabulary recall was accurate 83.5% of the time. Overall, this can be taken to indicate that over the duration of the study children’s overall reading comprehension was good to strong. This pilot study set out to see if dog-assisted reading supports could be tenably provided in the home.

Although the specific details vary among individual programs, they are designed to have children read to trained dogs, thus taking advantage of the non-judgmental and stress-reducing effects of a dog during reading programs for children. Although anecdotal evidence suggests there are benefits of the R.E.A.D. Program, the effectiveness of these programs to improve reading ability need further evaluation.

Now, in a new study, scientists have found that Basket, and other dogs that share her advanced word-learning ability, have a skill that puts them functionally on par with 18-month-old children: They can learn the names of new toys not only through ...

Whether it is a piece of food or ... similar. Scientists have discovered canines with the unusual ability to learn the names of myriad objects can pick up such labels by eavesdropping on conversations....