Dogs Can Actually Understand What You’re Saying to Them, Study Says

While inside the fMRI, a trainer spoke praise and neutral words in varying intonations as the scientists looked for activity in the brain regions that could suggest the differentiation of praise and neutral words, and praise and neutral intonations.

So, when talking to dogs as when talking to people, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. Since dogs have been socialized with humans for thousands of years, they are more alert to what people say to them and how.

While they might respond tentatively to a praising tone using words they do not understand – or even insults – they are only genuinely happy when they understand the praise they are receiving.

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. The dogs had been trained to lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. A combination of positive words and positive intonation also produced the most appealing result for dogs. In addition, they can combine both and interpret what the owner words meant t in a correct way.

This appears to contradict the idea that dogs only understand tone of voice and do not have an idea of the words actual meaning. And they process that information just like humans do, in the left hemisphere of their brains for vocabulary and the right hemisphere of the brain for intonation.

The findings run counter to the commonly held belief that the shift to left hemisphere processing of language was a hallmark of human evolution.

As the words were spoken, researchers tracked how the dogs’ brains reacted and processed the words in either tone of voice.

Attila Andics, neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, said that humans’ furry friends process both what they are told and how they are told, in a way remarkably similar to how our brains do.

Dogs’ ability to communicate with humans is old news.

So don’t let anyone tell you you’re insane for talking to your pets. According to Andics, words are uniquely human because we came up with them.