The results revealed that dogs can recognize individual words in their left brain hemispheres, just as humans can.
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To conduct the study, the researchers looked at 13 dogs. The dogs were not restrained, and “could leave the scanner at any time”, the authors said.
“But there was no difference for meaningless words, and this effect was independent from intonation”. So sometimes, you could tell experts a thing or two about your pet. But the really cool part is that they could actually distinguish between words, even when they were spoken with the same intonation. They listened to their trainer’s voice through headphones.
In conclusion, dogs will always be smarter and better than us.
Hence, it is not just humans who can understand and comprehend human language.
This undated photo made available by Eniko Kubinyi of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016 shows trained dogs, involved in a study to investigate how dogs process speech, posed around a scanner in Budapest, Hungary. The experts were able to scan and search what they were going through. While monitoring the reward system of the brain, the trainers praised the dogs in both a neutral voice and with a higher intonation.
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.
Brian Hare, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, told the Associated Press it was a “shocker” that word meaning seems to be processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Although humans evolved to understand speech and intonation more effectively, data suggests that dogs can do the same on a much smaller scale.
The team used an imaging machine to study the brains of the dogs, and probably the most hard part of the research was the training of the dogs to remain motionless during the process.
The biggest reward trigger in the brains of dogs is the tone and words that praise the dogs.
As an example the scientists tried out classic phrases like “well done”, and “good boy” and found that when spoken with positive intonation both sides of the brain lit up.
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However, spelling out words that denote action does not make sense to the dogs.
