Dogs understand human words and tones, research says

Dogs might know a lot more than we give them credit for, according to a research team in Budapest.

The researchers have shown that man’s best friend readily understands spoken words and also gains information from the intonation used.

The team also discovered that the words and tone are processed in the dog’s brain in the same way as humans, suggesting the evolution of language could go back much further than currently thought.

Most dog owners would contend that their pets respond to different words as if they fully understood the meaning.

Scientists at Eötvös Loránd University decided to examine this phenomenon and see what was going on inside the dog’s head when listening to its master’s voice.

Lead researcher Attila Andics and colleagues used brain scans to study how dogs processed the words.

The results showed that, just like in people, dogs process the meaning of words in the left half of the brain, while the right side of the brain comes into action when the intonation is processed.

More importantly, humans and dogs are both able to integrate the two types of information in order to come up with a unified meaning.

“Our findings suggest that dogs can . . . do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms [as humans],” said Dr Andics.

Details of the research were published on Tuesday by the journal Science.

Test

The researchers used a mix of meaningful and meaningless words and changed between praising and neutral intonation to test responses.

The best reaction occurred when the dogs heard praising words used in a praising tone.

This double whammy triggered the “reward centre” in a dog’s brain, the place activated by a scratch behind the ears, food and other good things.

It is unclear how a dog’s understanding of words and tone evolved, the researchers said.

The skill could have evolved as dogs were gradually domesticated, but this is unlikely because their ability to process words emerged too quickly.

This suggests older origins for the emergence of vocal communication.