Understanding the names of individual entities nonetheless assumes that dogs have to evoke the mental representation of the object upon hearing its name and thus link the two in a referential manner.

This study identifies a dog ERP component that reflects semantic expectations, thus providing the first neural evidence for object word understanding in a non-human species. The discovery of this capacity in dogs informs theoretical work on language evolution and semantics by revealing that the appreciation of referentiality during lexical processing is not a distinctive feature of human language use.