Many times it seems that man’s best friend understands perfectly everything we say to him; The truth is that the brain of dogs does differentiate both the sounds of human speech and the way we express ourselves: with joy, with anger, with sadness … That is, dogs not only listen to what we say, but also how we say it .
This is the conclusion of the latest work by a team of researchers from the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) who carried out a series of experiments with dogs to delve further into this connection between human speech and its reception by dogs. Thus, ” although we do not know how much speech dogs understand, we have been able to verify that they show cerebral tendencies opposed to verbal content and information related to the speaker,” explains Victoria Ratcliffe, the study leader, to the Sinc agency.
In their experiment, in which 25 dogs participated, the experts installed two digital speakers one and a half meters from each side of the dogs so that, when the sound was released, it entered each ear at the same time. Different signals were sent, some with more emphasis on verbal content and others on intonation. Hearing familiar commands with rather obvious meaning to them, the dogs turned their heads to the right showing activity in the left hemisphere of the brain. When they listened to the commands with exacerbated intonation, the dogs showed more activity in the right hemisphere.
“This implies that they process the components of speech separately , and suggests that the left hemisphere of the brain is more active in processing phonetic or verbal information from the speech and the right hemisphere is more active in processing information related to the speaker in the signal”, explains Ratcliffe.
This is the first time that scientific work has shown that dogs are also capable of differentiating and processing the different components of human speech in a way that is very similar to how we do . According to the study, published in the journal Current Biology , this perception of speech in humans could have developed during the domestication process and could also be a characteristic shared by other mammals such as horses.
