Ever wondered if man's best friend really knows what you're saying when you're lecturing him about drool on the new couch, or asking him to fetch you some weed? While it's been known for some time that dogs respond to the tone of humans' voices, a new study shows that yes indeed, dogs can also understand some human words, independent of the tone of voice that humans use when talking to dogs.
According to the study, which appears in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Science, dogs are able to understand both tone of voice and vocabulary using similar brain processes that humans use to understand language. According to a study press release, researchers were able to determine that, "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."
In the study, dogs were played recordings of their trainers' voices, and the trainers used a combination of different tones of voice and vocabulary words. Praise is often given to dogs in a higher pitch than other types of human/dog communication, so researchers wanted to see what would happen when the expected tone didn't necessarily match up with the typical corresponding vocabulary.
Using an fMRI machine, researchers determined that the dogs in the study were able to understand the words that were said to them, regardless of the tone used by the trainer. In fact, the study determined that dogs process language in a similar way that humans do—they use the same parts of the brain to process tone of voice separately from words to determine meaning. In short, it doesn't take a bag of mushrooms to help your dog understand what the heck you're saying to him.
Long live man's best friend.
