All the time you have been talking to your dog has not been in vain, according to a new study.
While teaching them to ‘sit’, ‘beg’ or ‘stay’ has been a challenge, it turns out that your pet not only understands the tone of your words but also the meaning.
Biologist and neuroscientist Attila Andics from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest has discovered through experiments dogs’ brains have the capacity to understand sounds better than we ever thought.
Through playing audio recordings to dogs with the voices of their owners and analysing brain scans the experts have found that regardless of the intonation, the animals were able to process and recognize vocabulary and recognize each word as different in a very similar way as we humans do. Using a multitude of words and phrases, the brain scans of the dogs showed how the canines processed the meaningful words in the left hemisphere of the brain like humans. However during the experiment Dr Andics realised that this didn’t happen the same way for the meaningless words. “There’s no acoustic reason for this difference,” Dr Andics said, “It shows that these words have meaning to dogs.”
All of Dr Andics’ research and findings can be read here: Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs
To sum up dogs would use both the intonation and the meaning of the words we say to process our messages. So it seems that learning vocabulary is not a distinctive human skill that resulted from the emergence of language, but rather an ancestral function that can be learnt by training the brain to relate arbitrary sequences of sounds with meanings.
I am sure that after reading this quite a lot of people will think twice what they say in the presence of their four-legged companion.
It may also interest you – The language of dogs
Written by Ana Baudot – Journalist and Social media manager.
Communication Trainee at DG TRAD – Terminology Coordination Unit.
Sources:
- CNN.com. Jacqueline Howard. 2016. Your dog understands what you’re saying, sort of – CNN.com. [ONLINE] Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/31/health/dogs-words-mri-study/. [Accessed 04 November 2016].
- The Independent. 2016. Dogs can understand human speech, scientists discover | The Independent. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/dogs-can-understand-human-speech-scientists-say-a7216481.html. [Accessed 04 November 2016].
- Science | A. Andics, A. Gábor, M. Gácsi, T. Faragó, D. Szabó, Á. Miklósi Aug. 2016. Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs [ONLINE] Available at: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/08/26/science.aaf3777.full [Accessed 04 November 2016].
- Science | AAAS. 2016. Video: Your dog understands more than you think [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/video-your-dog-understands-more-you-think. [Accessed 04 November 2016].
- VOA. 2016. Research Shows Dogs Really Do Understand Humans. [ONLINE] Available at: http://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/dog-brain-research/3488724.html. [Accessed 04 November 2016]
- YouTube. 2016. Your dog understands more than you think – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m529oUfKZ-8. [Accessed 04 November 2016].