According to a new study dogs are capable of understanding words to the extent that intonation is of secondary importance. Researchers at Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University measured the brain activity of 13 pet dogs as a trainer repeated words of praise used by their owners, as well as other meaningless words, in both a neutral and happy tone, reports the Washington Post.
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Dogs are man’s best friends, keeping people company along their lifetime and proving to be loyal and devoted buddies. They found the dogs would activate an area of the right brain to distinguish between intonation signaling kindness and neutral tones. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain. Revealingly, the reward centre only became active when dogs heard praise words in praising intonation, that is, praises delivered with higher and more varying pitch. Berns argues that the authors failed to test whether individual dogs had inherent biases to greater activity in one hemisphere or the other, independent of language.
Dogs understand more than we think. But the dog is looking at your body language and your eyes, and perhaps starting to infer that “stinky mess” is a word of praise.
“We trained dogs to lie motionless in an MRI scanner awake, and unrestrained for several minutes”. That meant the only information the dogs had was the speech signal. The trainer also tried neutral words like “however” and “nevertheless”.
You might want to watch what you say around your dog.it turns out he might be able to understand you.
MRI scans showed that dogs actually used both side of their brains like humans to understand words and tone.
While dogs process words in much the same way as humans do, researchers say we’re unique in our ability to use them. The researchers say it’s possible that domestication and artificial selection endowed dogs with this capacity, but admit it’s unlikely.
That means we aren’t as special as we like to think, at least when it comes to how our brains deal with language.
Scientists found that the meaningful words could activate dogs’ left hemispheres and got into the action of processing the words.
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“The most hard aspect of this training is for dogs to understand that being motionless means really motionless”, said Andics, who published the findings in the journal Science.
