His Master’s Voice

Sunday 04 January 2015

A new study reveals dogs process information and sound the same way as humans.

Researchers at the University of Sussex tested over 250 dogs to see which part of their brain reacts to different parts of speech. The study, by Dr David Reby and Victoria Ratcliffe, from the School of Psychology, discovered dogs understand both the sound of speech and the content of it too.

Rosie Barclay, a Jersey-based Certified Clinical Animal Behaviourist, said: “We have always known that dogs interpret sounds but this is really the evidence that they can understand the difference between tones of voice and words, so long as they have been taught the association.”

During the study, dogs were placed between speakers playing human speech from both sides. When the speech contained words from commands the dogs knew, but with the intonation removed, the dogs turned their heads to the right speaker, indicating they were processing it with the left side of their brains. If the command was in a foreign language, or with the word parts rearranged, the dogs turned their heads to the left speaker, showing they were using the right side of their brains.

Victoria Ratcliffe said: “Humans mainly use the left hemisphere of their brain to process the verbal content of speech and the right hemisphere to process the characteristics of the voice - whether it’s familiar, male or female - and its emotional content.

“Although we cannot say to what extent they understand the complexity of the verbal content, our study does suggest that dogs pay attention to this information in human speech and that they perceive its content in a way that broadly parallels human perception.”

The study confirms what many dog owners and trainers know; that consistency is the key to a dog understanding what you mean.

Rosie said: “The number of words a dog can understand depends on the individual dog and on how well it has been trained to associate words with different objects or actions. There are examples of dogs, like collies, which have been able to learn hundreds of words, but some dogs may only learn a couple of words.

“Dogs are usually very good at differentiating between different tones of voice, which is why it is so important to be consistent when speaking to your dog, and not to confuse it with lots of ‘white noise’.”

For Donelda Guy, a Heelwork to Music champion and a dog trainer with more than 40 years experience, the findings are just common sense.

She said: “Dogs are very intelligent and the more time you spend with them, the more they will be able to understand what you mean.”