Bunny, TikTok's beloved "talking" Sheepadoodle, never fails to amaze her millions of followers. From asking for play dates with dog friends on her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device to posing existential questions and reporting her dreams, it appears that the more Bunny talks, the more insight we gain into the minds of dogs. But a question has always lingered: how much does she really understand? What is learned behavior and what is Bunny's understanding?

Understandably, there have been skeptics believing that dogs who use soundboards don’t understand the words they’re using, but instead are responding to cues from their owners. However, a new study published in PLOS One by researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions, concluded that dogs do understand words and use soundboard buttons to produce appropriate responses.

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“What we can show now is that, at the very least for the participants in this study, is that the dog seems to be paying attention to the words and not with any kind of behavioral cueing from the experimenter,” Federico Rossano, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California–San Diego and co-author of the study, told Salon. “This is reassuring because it shows that it's not simply a........

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