Dogs grasp speech in a similar way to humans

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We convey information not only through words, but also through tonality.

It is well known that the sound makes the music.

This saying does not only apply to us humans.

Dogs also grasp individual words and also understand how we say something to them.

This way they know that they should sit down when the command "Sit!"

“Great!”, “Great!” Or “Well done!” Spoken in a high pitch they perceive as praise.

And the four-legged friends have something else in common with us two-legged friends in terms of speech understanding:

Dogs' brains also process language hierarchically like ours.

This is what researchers from the Hungarian Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest found out, as they report in the journal "Scientific Reports".

Source: Getty Images / 500px / Gonzalo Benalcázar

Researching the similarities and differences in language processing between the brains of dogs and humans can go a long way toward understanding how language evolved.

Anna Gábor, biologist at the Institute of Ethology, ELTE

For their study, Anna Gábor's scientists played a total of twelve dogs with different words and phrases and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine what was going on in the animals' heads.

At first they got well-known words of praise, such as

B. “Well done!” To be heard in neutral and positive intonation.

In a further experiment, the researchers played unknown neutral words such as “as if” and “still” to them in both laudatory and neutral tones.

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For the experiments, the behavioral researchers used a special technique: They repeated the stimuli over and over so that the animals got used to them.

The more frequent the repetitions, the lower the brain activity, explains the lead author of the study, Anna Gábor, in a press release:

“During the brain scans we sometimes repeated words, sometimes intonations.

A greater decrease in activity in a certain brain region due to certain repetitions proves the involvement of this area. "

The researchers Attila Andics and Anna Gábor together with a test dog at the MRT

Source: Enik Kubinyi / Eötvös Loránd University

The result: dogs also process words and intonations in the brain separately from one another in the same areas as we humans.

This is how they decipher words in the higher levels of the brain in the cerebral cortex.

Intonations, on the other hand, activate subcortical regions below the cerebral cortex.

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The conclusion of the scientists:

Although human language processing is unique in many ways, the study showed that there are interesting similarities between us and a species without a language of its own.

Attila Andics, research fellow at the Institute for Ethology, ELTE

According to the researchers, this does not mean that hierarchical processing has developed specifically for the analysis of language.

Rather, it is probably a general principle of how the brain works.

Accordingly, simpler, emotional stimuli such as pitches are processed in lower brain regions.

More complex information such as word meanings require more complex processing steps and are recorded in higher areas.

This article was first published in August 2020.