New study proves your dog can understand you when you talk

But a new study shows that simply telling your dog he’s a “good boy” may not be enough. The researchers also think these words were meaningless to the dogs.

Attila Andics, neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, said that humans’ furry friends process both what they are told and how they are told, in a way remarkably similar to how our brains do.

Image copyright VILJA AND VANDA MOLNÁR Image caption One of the dogs taking part in the research on the MRI Scanner table.

In this study, dogs who have been trained to remain still while their brain activity is recorded listened to recordings of their trainers talking.

Scientists find that doggy brains tend to process not only words but also the tone of human voices. The left hemisphere of dogs’ brains-the same region we use to process speech-showed different activation patterns for different words, and the auditory processing regions in the right hemisphere responded to tones, just like ours. Revealingly, the reward centre only became active when dogs heard praise words in praising intonation, that is, praises delivered with higher and more varying pitch.

“Praise is rewarding for dogs, but only if both word meaning and intonation match”, Andics said.

To conduct the study, the researchers looked at 13 dogs.

However, dogs have socialized with humans for thousands of years, therefore they pay more attention according to scientists. In other words, they heard you say the word “vet”, and they are not thrilled about it.

“We see now that speech processing mechanisms in dogs and humans are more similar than we thought”, Andics said.

Previous studies have found that dogs can understand language, matching objects to words, for example, but this is the first time researchers have examined how language is processed in the brains of dogs, The Washington Post reported. The researchers say it’s possible that domestication and artificial selection endowed dogs with this capacity, but admit it’s unlikely. The team wrote that the results showed new insights into the evolution of language, with Andics saying that the “neural mechanism” used to process the meaning of words is “not uniquely human”.