Next time someone gives you flack for holding a conversation with your pet, tell them that science is on your side.
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Dr Andics was most excited by what the experiment revealed about how and when humans developed language.
Dogs were trained to lie still on a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine for a couple of minutes, while scientists measured their brain activity. These words all have two syllables in Hungarian.
The dogs only registered that they were being praised if the words and intonation were positive.
Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere brain region to process words and the right hemisphere to process intonation, the researchers found.
But the new findings mean dogs are more like humans than was previously known.
Researchers in Hungary say dogs can actually understand many things their owners say to them, and they have the brain scans to prove it. In other words, the dogs combined meaning and intonation when processing their trainer’s speech. When the dogs heard these words, even if they were said in a positive tone, they didn’t react.
According to the study, which appears in the September 2 issue of the journal Science, dogs are able to understand both tone of voice and vocabulary using similar brain processes that humans use to understand language.
Neutral words such as “however” and “none the less” were also used.
The researchers used a mix of meaningful and meaningless words and changed between praising and neutral intonation to test responses.
“Dog brains care about both what we say and how we say it”, said the lead researcher in the study, Attila Andics, who is a neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
Dogs heard praise words in praising intonation, praise words in neutral intonation, and also some neutral conjunction words, meaningless to them, in praising and neutral intonations.
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To convey information through speech, people use both words and intonation, which is the way a person’s voice rises and falls to express an emotion or meaning, such as praise or disapproval.
