Be careful what you say, dog owners, Spot may be listening

And we can thank Hungary for it, because a group of Hungarian researchers recently published a study that proves our pet dogs can process words and sounds on the same level as we do. “The main result is not that they can differentiate words, but that they differentiate meaningful and meaningless words, and the left hemisphere has a key role there”, he said.

Main researcher Dr Attila Andics, of EötvösLorand University, Budapest, said at the time of speech processing, a well-known labor distribution takes place inside the human brain.

To carry out the study, 13 dogs were trained to lie motionless in an MRI scanner awake and unrestrained.

The team tested the dogs by saying different words with various intonations – for example, a meaningless word spoken in an encouraging voice, or a meaningful word said in a neutral tone.

Dogs are likely more attentive to what people say to them because they’ve been socialized with humans for thousands of years. Brain scans revealed that, like humans, dogs processed words with the left side of their brains and used the right side to process pitch. And when they heard words of praise said in a praising tone, another important part of their brain lit up: the reward area.

Dogs process both words and the intonation of human speech to decipher meaning.

In the study, the researchers wanted to see whether dogs also pay attention to both words and intonation when trying to understand what a human is trying to say to them.

The scientists in the study used MRI to measure brain activity in the dogs participating in the study.

Dogs respond to praise, and they not only listen to the words but also to the tone of voice and inflections, a recent study shows. The familiar words were understood regardless of tone, according to brain activity images.

The findings, researchers say, mean the ability to process language may have evolved much earlier than thought.

It means that dogs can pick up when their owners are not being consistent in their language and tone. This is similar to the human brain processes.