Researchers from Hungary decode the similarities of how humans and dogs process speech and intonation in their brains.
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In a groundbreaking research, Hungarian scientists decode the similarities between the speech processing between humans and his best friend, ‘The Doggo’. Ever wondered how your loving dog understands your instructions in human language? The Hungarian scientists at Eötvös Loránd University unearthed the secrets.
According to the findings, dogs, though unable to speak like humans, carry the same pattern of speech processing in their brains. Both humans and dogs process the speech and intonation separately which means the brain recognizes the meaning of the words (speech) and how the rise and fall of the voice (Intonation) separately.
The researchers used Functional MRI, a brain mapping technique on awake dogs to find out the activity of the dog’s brain. Interestingly, the experiment revealed that the dog processed intonation in the lower subcortical region of the brain while they could make out the exact meaning of the words in the cortical regions similar to the linguistic and speech cognition as humans.
Dogs are well known to intercept the human communication seamlessly. They can pick up the lexcical meaning of both words and intonation like humans. Dogs do recognize the intent when you praise them with high tone and might appear happy. More commonly, dogs do understand the simple instructions like ‘sit, lie, turn, kneel etc’ despite the changes in intonation (raise and fall of your tone) and respond accordingly even if we changed our intonation.
According to Anna Gábor, the lead Author of the research, ”exploring the similarities and differences of human and dogs brains will go a long way to understand how speech evolved’. However, they say that very little is still known what happens in a dog’s brain during the interactions.”
Previously, the researchers in their scientific publication had revealed that ”both dogs and humans analyse the lexical and intonation cues separately and integrate the cognition of an expression and suggested that the ability had evolved even in the absence of a language,” the research concluded.
