Sometimes we feel as if our dogs understand everything we say. Of course, we realize that dogs are conditioned to understand our sounds and certain words, but it’s still fun to think back from time to time.
It seems that dogs may know more about our speech than many people realize. Based on search Published in the journal NeroImage, dogs may be more able to understand and perceive human voices than most people can imagine.
This is the first study of its kind to offer this level of information.
18 pet dogs were used in the study, and the study’s authors trained them to lie completely still. This was necessary because they were inserted into an MRI scanner so that their brain activity could be recorded.
During the MRI scan, they will listen to recordings of human speech. The 16 dogs in the study were kept in homes where the family spoke Hungarian. The other two stayed in Spanish-speaking houses.
The researchers will play part of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” in both Hungarian and Spanish as the dogs are scanned. They also play versions of the recordings that don’t make any sense because they’re jumbled up and won’t make sense to anyone who listens to them.
The researchers saw certain brain activity while the animals were listening to versions of the recordings. Patterns show up in the primary auditory cortex, but they differ, depending on whether they hear muffled noises or real voices.
As a result of this part of the study, it is assumed that dogs know the difference between what is human speech and what is human speech. That can be determined, regardless of the language the dogs are most familiar with.
In a statement for EurekaAlert!Raúl Hernández-Pérez, the study’s author, says that dogs are innately able to detect the spontaneity of sounds but are not necessarily able to identify what a human voice is.
The researchers went further by comparing the brain activity of dogs when they heard a passage in a foreign language or something familiar to them. However, in this particular case, another part of the brain was active during that time. It is called the secondary auditory cortex. In other words, there is a part of the dog’s brain that supports the spontaneity of speech and another that supports the language.
It appears that this difference was seen in all dogs but it was more pronounced in older dogs. The researchers felt that the more a dog was exposed to a particular language, the more likely they were to recognize it.
Another thing that emerged from the study was that dogs with longer heads appeared to have stronger differences in those brain regions. This was unexpected, but it suggests that it’s possible that different dog breeds can distinguish human voices in different ways.
Attila Andics, one of the study’s authors, told EurekaAlert: “The ability to learn about the rules of a language is not unique to humans.” They go on to say that it is unknown whether this is something specific to dogs or if all non-human species may share something in common.
Andics sums it all up by saying: “It is possible that brain changes from the tens of thousands of years that dogs have lived with humans have made them better at hearing language, but this is not necessarily the case. Future studies will have to find this out.”
