If yes then it probably does. Of course the biggest response in the dogs’ brains’ reward centers came from praise words said in a praising tone.
Advertisement
Andics said, “They are really happy to participate”.
To determine this, the Hungarian researchers and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest trained a collection of family-owned golden retrievers and border collies to sit quietly inside an MRI scanner.
A groundbreaking new study suggests dogs can understand more than just the intonation of our words, as experts previously assumed.
“We looked for brain regions that differentiated between meaningful and meaningless words, or between praising and non-praising intonations”.
A new study has found that dog brains process speech in a way similar to humans, understanding both words’ meanings as well as their tone, the New York Times reports.
Therefore, it is thought humans and dogs may have relied on similar networks that were already in place before language evolved, and later adapted to process human speech.
The researchers say that during the scans, it became apparent that dogs process words in the left hemisphere while intonation was interpreted by the right hemisphere, like human brains. “To find that dogs have a very similar neural mechanism to tell apart meaningful words from meaningless sound sequences is, I think, really unbelievable”. Intonation can convey so much information, which forms the basis of our verbal communication alongside the words that we use. I always wonder what the dogs think as they continue doing whatever they were doing to begin with, and she keeps talking. Scientists in Hungary have recently recorded this fact. While monitoring the reward system of the brain, the trainers praised the dogs in both a neutral voice and with a higher intonation.
Humans understand speech through both vocabulary and intonation. The left hemisphere of the canine brain processes meaning, while tone of voice is dealt with in the right hemisphere.
Advertisement
“There’s no special neuron mechanism, it seems from this study, in humans that made us able to start using words”.
