The theory is that dogs start to understand that the words “good boy” are a good thing when said in a positive tone.
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Other scientists agree that the new study findings don’t necessarily show that dogs think just like we do. “This study shows that my childish self was wrong: The dog’s brain really can discriminate meaningful from meaningless words”. Research in 2014 showed dogs rely on intonation to separate speech components, allowing them to understand what owners mean by, “Let’s go for a walk”, but that study could not show how the speech was being processed in the canine brain.
The researchers said it’s unlikely that human selection of dogs during their domestication, which occurred at least 15,000 years ago, could have led to this sort of brain function; instead, they say, it’s probably far more ancient.
The study found that, when dogs receive praise, it activates the reward center of the brain – the s that gets activated by food, s That reward center was only active when the dog heard praise in an earnest tone.
Scientists find that doggy brains tend to process not only words but also the tone of human voices.
As an experiment, researchers trained puppies to sit still for seven minutes in a fMRI scanner to measure activity in their brain.
Dogs process both words and the intonation of human speech to decipher meaning. “But our words and intonations are not meaningless to dogs”. The familiar words were understood regardless of tone, according to brain activity images.
“We see now that speech processing mechanisms in dogs and humans are more similar than we thought”, Andics said.
“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.
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.
“What we saw is that for praise to be processed as a reward, when there is no other supporting information, both word meaning and intonation have to fit”, continued Andics.
Humans use both words and the intonation of speech to decipher the meaning of language, and it turns out that our dogs do, too. As Andics put it, “What makes words uniquely human is not a special neural capacity, but our invention of using them”.
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“Humans seem to be the only species which uses words and intonation for communicating emotions, feelings, inner states”, he says.
