New Study Reveals Exciting Speech Processing Similarities Between Humans And Dogs

Human and dog brains alike, process speech according to a hierarchy; meanings of a word at higher stages and intonations at lower stages.

Hungarian researchers at the Department of Ethology, Faculty of Science, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) champion this study by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on awake dogs to assess their brain activity.

It’s important for dog parents to know that talking to your pups, who have a sensitivity to human communicative signs like what we say and how we say it (intonation), carries interpretational information for them. This is exemplified in praising your pup; a high-toned voice translates to positive intent to them.

As aforementioned, humans and dogs process speech according to a similar hierarchy; such a study is useful in understanding how our speech came to emergence during evolution.

The assessment revealed that in as much as humans and dogs share a hierarchal speech process (intonation at lower stages, and known words at higher stages) humans attain a unique type of speech process while our pups and other species heed more to emotionally fueled signals!

Feature Image Source: Pixabay