Study shows dogs understand and filter human commands
WHILE we may think our pet dogs are just ignoring our commands, in fact they not only listen but filter how we speak and even what we say.
However the study doesn't mean our canine chums actually understand everything humans might say or that they have a human-like ability of language.
They do differentiate and process those various components of human speech such as emotional tone, the first ever evidence of its kind showed.
Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study, we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information
Associate Tutor Victoria Ratcliffe of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex said the results support the idea that our canine companions are paying attention "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say.
"Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study, we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information and that these components appear to be processed in different areas of the dog's brain."
Previous studies showed that dogs have hemispheric biases - left brain versus right - when they process the vocalisation sounds of other dogs.
The study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology investigated whether dogs show similar biases in response to the information transmitted in human speech.
Experiments involved playing speech from either side of the dog so that the sounds entered each of their ears at the same time and with the same amplitude.
Ms Ratcliffe said: "The input from each ear is mainly transmitted to the opposite hemisphere of the brain.
"If one hemisphere is more specialised in processing certain information in the sound, then that information is perceived as coming from the opposite ear." If the dog turned to its left, that showed that the information in the sound being played was heard more prominently by the left ear, suggesting that the right hemisphere is more specialised in processing that kind of information.
Researchers did observe general biases in dogs' responses to particular aspects of human speech. When presented with familiar spoken commands in which the meaningful components of words were made more obvious, dogs showed a left-hemisphere processing bias, as indicated by turning to the right.
When the intonation or speaker-related vocal cues were exaggerated instead, dogs showed a significant right-hemisphere bias.
Dr David Reby said: "This is particularly interesting because our results suggest that the processing of speech components in the dog's brain is divided between the two hemispheres in a way that is actually very similar to the way it is separated in the human brain."
