Neuroscientists from the University of Budapest used brain scanners to investigate the brain activity of dogs when they heard their owner's voice, and specific words spoken by the owner. The dogs heard both meaningful and nonsense words spoken in praising and neutral tones. They found that dogs respond to actual words and not just the tone in which they are spoken, which suggests dogs do comprehend the words. Their work appears in the latest issue of Science.
When the scientists analyzed the brain scans, they saw that—regardless of the trainer's intonation—the dogs processed the meaningful words in the left hemisphere of the brain, just as humans do, they write this week in Science. But the dogs didn't do this for the meaningless words. "There's no acoustic reason for this difference," Andics says. "It shows that these words have meaning to dogs."
From the paper's abstract:
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lexical and intonational information. We found a left-hemisphere bias for processing meaningful words, independently of intonation; a right auditory brain region for distinguishing intonationally marked and unmarked words; and increased activity in primary reward regions only when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise. Neural mechanisms to separately analyze and integrate word meaning and intonation in dogs suggest that this capacity can evolve in the absence of language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @01:20PM
A lot of commentators here miss the context you provide. The report is about separating out the words from both the tone and context, which they claim to have done. Dogs clearly react to facial expressions, tone, and context (if I pick up his leash and stand by the door, my dog gets very excited about the prospect of a walk regardless of whether I say anything or not). Why they believe they've separated this out is that their brain scans react in ways consistent with processing and understanding the spoken words, where they react differently to nonsense words spoken in the same tones.
I'm particularly impressed with them getting the dogs to lay still in a noisy MRI machine. My dogs wouldn't be so calm.