During the experiments, dog owners voiced different combinations of words and tones: praise words with approving intonation, praise words with neutral intonation, neutral words with praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation. Each word was spoken in a happy tone, and then a neutral tone. “Again, this is very similar to what human brains do”.
Advertisement
“But there was no difference for meaningless words, and this effect was independent from intonation”.
The team, led by Attila Andics, said that they trained 13 dogs to lie motionless inside a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine for the objective of scanning their brains.
The team also discovered that the words and tone are processed in the dog’s brain in the same way as humans, suggesting the evolution of language could go back much further than now thought.
The left hemisphere of the dogs’ brains lit up when they heard meaningful words or phrases, such as “Well done”, regardless of the tone of voice the researchers used.
“So by studying dogs, we’ve actually revealed something very exciting about how language emerged in humans”. The researchers had already identified that the same part of dogs’ brains interprets non-verbal sounds that elicit emotions.
Research fellow Attila Andics from the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, and his colleagues, wanted to find out whether dogs relied on the same mechanisms.
The head of the study says that the results prove that dogs separate what we say from how we say it and can combine intonation and vocabulary to form a correct interpretation of what we are saying. A study published in the journal Science showed that dogs process words with the left hemisphere and use the right hemisphere to process intonation.
So while dogs probably won’t be listening attentively to full sentences anytime soon, the new research shows that words and tone matter, and that when they match, the dogs notice.
More importantly, humans and dogs are both able to integrate the two types of information in order to come up with a unified meaning.
“The hard aspect of the training was to convince dogs that “motionless” means really motionless”, says Andics.
Advertisement
“Using words may be a human invention but now we see the neuromechanisms to process them are not uniquely human”, Andics said.
