Dogs understand what we say and how we say it: study

Dog owners, take note! Your pet pooch may not only comprehend the words that you speak, but also how you say them, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that dogs have the ability to distinguish vocabulary words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use.

Attila Andics from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary said that vocabulary learning "does not appear to be a uniquely human capacity that follows from the emergence of language, but rather a more ancient function that can be exploited to link arbitrary sound sequences to meanings." Words are the basic building blocks of human languages, but they are hardly ever found in nonhuman vocal communications.
Intonation is another way that information is conveyed through speech, where, for example, praises tend to be conveyed with higher and more varying pitch. Humans understand speech through both vocabulary and intonation. Andics and colleagues explored whether dogs also depend on both mechanisms.

Dogs were exposed to recordings of their trainers' voices as the trainers spoke to them using multiple combinations of vocabulary and intonation, in both praising and neutral ways. For example, trainers spoke praise words with a praising intonation, praise words with a neutral intonation, neutral words with a praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse the dogs' brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. The results show that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognising each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain.

Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain. Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances.

Thus, dogs seem to understand both human words and intonation.The researchers noted that it is possible that selective forces during domestication could have supported the emergence of the brain structure underlying this capability in dogs, but, such rapid evolution of speech-related hemispheric asymmetries is unlikely. Humans are only unique in their ability to invent words, they said. The research appears in the journal Science.