Washington DC - Do dogs really understand the words we say to them, or are they just responding to tone and context clues? This is a question that has long perplexed owners, but new scientific research might have some answers.

A new brain wave study published Friday in Current Biology suggests that hearing the names of their favorite toys actually activates dogs' memories of those objects.

"It definitely shows us that it's not human-unique to have this type of referential understanding," study author Lilla Magyari of the Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary told AFP, explaining that researchers have been skeptical up to this point.

With a couple of famous exceptions, dogs have fared poorly on lab tests requiring them to fetch objects after hearing their names, and many experts have argued it isn't so much what we say but rather how and when we say things that pique our pooches' interest.

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Yelling, "Go get the stick!" and having a dog successfully bring the object back doesn't conclusively prove they know what the word "stick" means, for example.

Even scientists who concede that dogs do pay attention to our speech have said that, rather than really understanding what words stand for, they are reacting to particular sounds with a learned behavior.

In the new paper, Magyari and colleagues applied a non-invasive brain imaging technique to 18 dogs brought to their lab in Budapest.

The test involved taping electrodes to the dogs' heads to monitor their brain activity.

Their owners said words for toys they were most familiar with, for example, "Kun-kun, look, the ball!" – and then showed them either a matching object or a mismatched object.

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After analyzing the EEG recordings, the team found different brain patterns when dogs were shown matching versus mismatched objects.

This experimental setup has been used for decades in humans, including babies, and is accepted as evidence of "semantic processing," or understanding of meaning.

The test also had the benefit of not requiring the dogs to fetch something in order to prove their knowledge.

"We found the effect in 14 dogs," co-first author Marianna Boros told AFP, proving the ability is not confined to "a few exceptional dogs."

Even the four that "failed" may have simply been tested on the wrong words, she added!