Apparently, that’s wrong! While dogs indeed understand different tones, they likewise know what some particular words mean. The neutral words did not garner the same response, showing that dogs have some understanding of their meaning (or lack thereof).
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Dogs process both words and the intonation of human speech to decipher meaning. This did not happen when they heard words they did not understand.
In hindsight, one can say that dogs are indeed more intelligent than we think they are.
However, dogs separate intonation from words, and process intonation in the brain’s right hemisphere.
What’s more, the dogs only registered that they were being praised if the words and pitch were positive. So the moral of the story is don’t try and get your dog excited about a visit to the vet by using a high-pitched voice, they are onto your shenaningans.
The brain study also revealed that dogs respond best when they hear positive words spoken in a rewarding tone. Similarly, humans use the left parts of their brains while trying to understand the meanings of words and the right parts of their brains while trying to understand intonation. The hard aspect of the training was to convince dogs that “motionless” means really motionless.
Researchers suggest that the mechanisms to process language are not unique to humans and evolved earlier than previously believed.
Hare adds that this is an important discovery as it involves non-invasive research on animals that are awake, as they generally have to be restrained for tests.
DrAndics mentioned that their findings have suggested that our furry friends can also perform all that, and quite similar brain mechanisms are used by them. Looking at the brain scans, the researchers looked for brain regions that differentiated between meaningful and meaningless words, or between praising and non-praising intonations. He says, “To find that dogs have a very similar neural mechanism to tell apart meaningful words from meaningless sound sequences is, I think, really incredible”.
According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), researchers gave dogs MRIs while a recording of their trainer’s voices were played.
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“The neural capacities to process words that were thought by many to be uniquely human are actually shared with other species”, he said.
