A new study backs up the idea that your dog can understand certain words. The way dogs can understand how some words refer to certain objects suggests they could understand words in a similar way to humans. Researchers in Europe said they were inspired by studies about the way infants understand the world before they can speak, and decided to try similar experiments with dogs. They found that brain activity in 14 of the 18 dogs they studied was different when they were shown an object that matched a word, compared to a mismatched image to a word. The researchers do say that the full extent of what pups comprehend isn’t even close to being known.