Dogs can understand more than we thought

Dogs can understand more than we thought

Sit! Stop! Obedient boy! Many of us use these words with our closest animal friends every day, and a recent new study suggests that dogs may be able to understand a good part of what we say, and even pay special attention to how we say it.

The results, published in the science journal Science, may prove the truth of what dog lovers believed in, that their close friends could handle the language differently from the belief that has been prevailing for many years. "We think words are a human thing, but in reality, dogs can manipulate the meanings of words and the tone of speech in a way that is very similar to what humans do," says lead researcher Attila Andiks, a neuroscientist at the Otvos Lorand University in Budapest.


Scientists have long believed that a person's ability to form words - the basic building blocks of language - arose as a distinct brain mechanism to support the ability to communicate. Andex explains this by saying that the terms are arbitrary sounds to which humans define their meanings. In general, this ability is not evident in other animals, and Andex notes that although dogs cannot pronounce words, they seem to be able to understand a large group of them. Dogs sit, pick up what is ejaculated, shake hands and cuddle, in response to the manipulations of their owners every day.

Dogs can distinguish between a cheerful tone of voice and an angry tone.
To test the words that dogs can recognize, Andex and his team hired thirteen dogs from different breeds, from Border Collie to Golden Retrievers. They trained the dogs to lie still in a functional MRI machine for seven minutes, and then they played a dog trainer's recording, and while dogs were listening to the record, scientists measured their brain activity.

The research team tested different combinations of words and audible tones. For example, a record contains promotional phrases like "Well done!" In a highly motivational tone, in another recording, the coach may repeat the same phrase but in a neutral tone, or say random, incomprehensible sentences consisting of only associating words such as "if" and "whatever."

The researchers reported that the survey results indicated that dogs, like humans, use different areas of the brain to treat different parts of the conversation, as they use the left half of the brain to analyze the meanings of words, and the right half to analyze the tone of the voice. The dogs participating in the experiment also seemed to be able to synthesize these two information together. When the positive words match the positive tone of voice, their brains activate the reward centers and the dopamine secretion. However, when combining positive words with neutral vocalizations, reward circuitry activity was lower. On the other hand, when meaningless words were uttered in a positive tone, dogs' reward circles did not respond at all. "The dogs are very smart. Praising them with the right tone of voice equals the effect of other rewards such as food and raising their owner on their back with approval,"Two researchers reviewed the x-ray of the activities of dog brains.

These results add to previous studies that demonstrate that dogs can treat nonverbal semantics such as tone of voice, says Victoria Ratcliffe - an animal behavior researcher at the University of Sussex who has not participated in this study. In Ratcliffe's research, she found that dogs can distinguish between male and female voices, and can even distinguish the tone of a voice in a sentence in a foreign language. "This new study demonstrates that dogs can capture more information than we thought," says Ratcliffe.


Ratcliffe adds: Although we don't know exactly what the brains of dogs explain when you hear words of praise and approval, these results indicate that words have a kind of representation and meaning in their brains. Other animals may also be using the same areas of the brain to treat language. Ratcliffe explained that studying animals that show similar half-brain biases towards their voices - such as primates, sea lions, and horses - can reveal important evidence of how old language processing mechanisms are. Common to all mammals. "