Clever dogs like infants when picking up words

Dog owners can often be heard talking to their pets as if they are children, and a new study suggests that this is not entirely irrational – it found that dogs have the same ability to distinguish words as babies.

The research focused on how pet dogs processed human speech, particularly whether they could identify distinct words when listening to a babble of speech.

There are two basic ways to assess whether a certain set of sounds is likely to form a word, the most obvious being to hear it many times. If, for instance, you are frequently exposed to the word ‘‘dragon’’, at some point your brain will decide that it is indeed a word. Human infants can do this long before they appreciate what a dragon is.

But infants also have a more subtle way to identify combinations of sounds that are likely to be words. This involves the brain being aware of which syllables frequently go together. This method is quicker, and requires the brain to be far more nimble.

Imagine that the infant brain is confronted with the phrase ‘‘scary dragon’’ for the first time. It could decide that there are three words: sca/rydra/gon. Or it can decide that there are two: scary and dragon. Roughly speaking, the brain recognises that it is highly probable that the ‘‘scar’’ and ‘‘y’’ sounds form one unit, and that so do ‘‘dra’’ and ‘‘gon’’.

Babies spontaneously do this at about eight months old, despite being oblivious to what the words scary and dragon mean.

The latest study found evidence that dogs do something similar.

The researchers scanned the brains of pet dogs while they were played a recording of a stream of nonsense words. When syllables that often go together in natural speech were played, the dogs brains’ showed patterns of activity similar to those seen in babies.

Dr Marianne Boros, of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, a co-author of the study, said: ‘‘The complex computations and the specific brain regions that dogs and humans use to discover words are surprisingly similar.’’

Dr Lilla Magyari, another coauthor of the study, published in Current Biology, said the dogs appeared to be subconsciously using ‘‘exactly the kind of complex statistics human infants use to extract words from continuous speech’’.