They found that dogs processed words with the left hemisphere, while intonation was processed with the right hemisphere just like humans.
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“For dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match”, Andics said.
“Both what we say and how we say it matters to dogs”, said Attila Andics, a research fellow at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
“So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant”.
Dogs have the ability to distinguish vocabulary words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a new study reports.
As the dogs listened, their brain was scanned with a functional magnetic resonance imager, which is a non-invasive way of measuring blood flow in the brain and determines which parts light up during a task.
“What makes words uniquely human is not a special neural capacity, but our invention of using them”, the scientists said. They found that the canines could process some distinct words, regardless of intonation; that they processed intonation separately from vocabulary; and that a dog’s “reward center” was activated only when the praising words and intonations matched.
While other species probably also have the mental ability to understand language like dogs do, their lack of interest in human speech makes it hard to test, said Andics.
“Dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant”.
The study was published in the journal Science.
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In other words, “good boy” said in a neutral tone and “however” said in a positive or neutral tone all got the same response. Here, Andics and colleagues explored whether dogs also depend on both mechanisms. News stories displayed here appear in our category for General and are licensed via a specific agreement between LongIsland.com and The Associated Press, the world’s oldest and largest news organization. For the protection of AP and its licensors, content may not be copied, altered or redistributed in any form. Intonation is another way that information is conveyed through speech, where, for example, praises tend to be conveyed with higher and more varying pitch.
