Does My Dog Understand Me?

Have you ever wondered why your dog gives you the head tilt? You know what we mean right? You’ll say something to your dog and suddenly your dog will tilt their head to one side. You’re dying to know what they’re thinking right? Well, we’ve wondered too!

So we set off to find an answer to this lifelong question in the series of “Why does my dog do that?”, and we found some really interesting information!

Now, we KNOW our dogs are smart, and we know that some are smarter than others. What we learned from a study performed last year was that as dogs began to learn a new word for their toys or an object, they would tilt their heads either to the left or to the right while listening! The study data suggested that dogs who were able to learn words faster tilted their heads more often. They call these dogs Gifted Word Learners, or, GWLs. The dogs that didn’t learn as quickly and who didn’t learn above chance levels were classified as Typical dogs based on their learning ability.

The study was comprised of 3 experiments during a 3-month duration with testing intervals at each month. As the dogs learned the names of the toys, they would be tested each month with the goal of retrieving the right toy from another room by a verbal command from their owner. The toy request was random and at testing points the dogs would be choosing between 2 and 13 different toys. Their owners would sit before them and verbally request the toy, and the dog would head off to the other room to bring it back. The study showed that the GWL dogs consistently gave their owners a head tilt when their owners were speaking in front of them. The typical dogs did not. So, they think it could also be a sign of increased attention from their dog because they are hearing something meaningful. The researchers wondered if the head tilts might also be related to the dog making a memory match from the visual to the spoken word of the object. They call that a cross-modal match. All of the dogs were exposed to the same toys and the spoken object names so they were equally familiar with them, so this went above chance learning. Now, while the dogs in this study were all border collies, the researchers stated that it’s too soon to say that border collies as a breed are more inclined to be GWLs and do the head tilt with that.

The researchers were intrigued by their findings and data, and now want to do more studies on this to see how different breeds learn and perform! I We do too! But I think we can take away from this story that the head-tilt does have solid implications that your dog is a smart cookie and is actually listening to you!

How many of you out there have dogs who give you the lauded head tilt and what have they learned? Feel free to share in the comments! We love hearing about our dogs!

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