Dog's really are man's best friend - New study says they understand our words and emotions

By Staff Reporter - 27 Nov '14 17:36PM

Man's best friend is truly a great friend and listener. A new study has revealed that domesticated dogs can not only distinguish emotions from human speech but the content of words too.

According to research published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology, dog's brains are wired to process multiple components of human speech, with some regions specializing in the verbal contents of speech and others specializing in the familiarity with and emotional tone of the speaker.

In an experiment, 250 dogs were put to the test with a clip of human speech played to both the left and right side of them - dogs send the information heard by the right ear to the left-hand side of the brain and vice-versa.

Associate Tutor from the University of Sussex School of Psychology, Victoria Ratcliffe, says "Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study, we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information and that these components appear to be processed in different areas of the dog's brain,"

Ratcliffe said that the input from each ear is mainly transmitted to the opposite hemisphere of the brain and if one hemisphere is more specialized in processing certain information in the sound, then that information is perceived as coming from the opposite ear.

"Our results suggest that the processing of speech components in the dog's brain is divided between the two hemispheres in a way that is actually very similar to the way it is separated in the human brain," comments psychologist David Reby, also of the University of Sussex.

Animal behavior professor Nicholas Dodman, of the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine was not part of the study, but he jests, "No, dogs are not going to read books or compose sonnets, but they can take quite a bit out of what we're saying. They are picking up certain sounds that have meaning for them. They're also picking up the tenor of what we're saying."