BARKING MAD?
PROOF DOGS UNDERSTAND WHAT THEIR OWNERS SAY
YOUR dog really does understand every word you say, scientists now believe.
Research showed that man’s best friend does not just pick up on the tone of human voices – the animal learns the meaning of individual words.
Hungarian scientists found dogs can recognise up to 1,000 words.
And their brains process information much like humans, the left side dealing with words and the right side with tone.
The study is the first to investigate how dogs follow speech.
Trained
Its findings suggests the ability of the brain to process words evolved much earlier than was thought.
And the researchers concluded that learning vocabulary “does not appear to be a uniquely human capacity”.
Thirteen dogs were trained to listen to their owners’ voices while an MRI scanner checked brain activity.
The dogs were played recordings of the owners speaking positive words and phrases such as “good boy,” “super” and “well done”.
They also listened to neutral words such as “however” and “nevertheless”. The two sets of words were said in both praising and neutral tones.
But this did not fool the pets. They could understand the actual words, regardless of the tone, although they did react best to praise when the tone matched the words.
The findings, published in the journal Science, showed that dogs can process vocabulary regardless of voice tones.
Lead researcher Attila Andics of Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, said: “For dogs, nice praise can work very well as a reward.
“But it does work best if both words and intonation match.
“So, dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it.
“They can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant.
“This is very similar to what human brains do.”
So next time you say “Good boy”, to your dog, just make sure you sound like you really mean it.
RESEARCHERS have found that dogs can understand up to 1,000 words. We’ll have to add “they’re good listeners” to the list of reasons why dogs are man’s best friend.