Guess What: Dogs Can Understand Everything We’re Telling Them

Dogs were trained to lie still on a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine for a couple of minutes, while scientists measured their brain activity.

Also, like humans, the dogs were found to process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right side of the brain.

Neural signatures on the fMRI scans showed dogs differentiate between words regardless of intonation, suggesting dogs can process vocabulary. That’s basically the same way humans respond to speech, too. They also spoke the same words in a neutral tone, and also meaningless words such as “however” in the two intonations. In a recent study, praise only activated dogs’ reward center in the brain when both the words and the intonation were positive.

Dogs didn’t develop the physical structures that would have allowed them to form words, but they have the mental capacity to process words and intonations from their human companions, in other words. Of course the biggest response in the dogs’ brains’ reward centers came from praise words said in a praising tone. When the dogs heard these words, even if they were said in a positive tone, they didn’t react.

So say scientists in Hungary, who have published a ground-breaking study that found dogs understand both the meaning of words and the intonation used. Each word was spoken in a happy tone, and then a neutral tone. They say dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years, meaning they’ve become accustomed and attentive to what people say to them. This new study shows canines use the same part of their brains as humans do to process words, intonation and grammar.

This means that they are more attentive to what people say to them and how they say it.

Andics said he suspects similar brain activity occurs in other domesticated animals, such as cats and horses.

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“So by studying dogs, we’ve actually revealed something very exciting about how language emerged in humans”. The dogs were awake and unrestrained as they listened to their trainer’s voice through headphones.