A study published this week in the journal Science suggests dogs can understand both the words that humans speak and the way they are intoned.
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“It is mainly the left hemisphere’s job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere’s job to process intonation”.
Two mechanisms are needed to us to understand what another person says: words and intonation.
What’s more, the dogs only registered that they were being praised if the words and pitch were positive. The ability to understand the words used around them would enhance the dogs’ ability to communicate and cooperate with their families.
The dogs’ neural “reward center”, which is connected to feelings of happiness and pleasure, similarly lit up when the dogs heard praising words.
Meanwhile, parts of the right hemisphere reacted to intonation, suggesting that the dogs processed the meaning of words separately from the tone in which they were spoken, according to the brain scans.
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 study doesn’t claim that dogs understand words in the sense that we understand each other’s words”. “Praise can work as a reward only if both word meaning and intonation match”. A recent study has discovered that dog may learn language similar to the way their human owners learn language. This new study proves otherwise, showing that dogs use both brain hemispheres to determine what a phrase actually means. When the same praises were uttered in a neutral tone, it still garnered the same results which only means that our animal best friends are a lot smarter than we thought.
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“That’s really cool! I don’t own a dog, so I’m not for sure [if it’s true], but I know cats don’t have [that ability] because my cat doesn’t listen very well”, Ray said. “We don’t know. It has never been tested”. “When I talk to my dogs, it’s like “oh come here puppy” – I kind of talk to them like they’re babies, and I think they love me more”.
