Dogs process language in a similar way to humans
The four-legged friends are not only able to distinguish between the tone of voice and content of commands: Their brain apparently processes both on the same levels as the human brain.
Dogs not only understand how you talk to them, but also what you say to them. This is suggested by a sophisticated series of experiments, the results of which were published by scientists led by Attila Andics from Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University in the journal "Science" back in 2016: According to the study, the four-legged friends not only recognise what their masters or mistresses want from them by their tone of voice, but also grasp the meaning of individual words such as "fass" or "sitz" - even when these are presented in a monotone voice. However, this is not the only thing that humans and dogs have in common when it comes to understanding language. Apparently, tone of voice and content are also processed at similar levels in the brains of animals as in humans. This is now shown by a follow-up experiment, which Andics and his team report on in the journal "Scientific Reports".
The researchers again played various praising phrases ("Good boy!", "Well done!") and neutral expressions ("As if", "Nevertheless") to their test dogs - sometimes in a neutral, sometimes in a favourable tone of voice. At the same time, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse what was going on in the animals' heads. Andics and his colleagues had already observed in 2016 that the dogs' brains process word content and intonation in different hemispheres. Now, however, they also discovered that the hierarchy of language processing was the same as in the human brain: as in humans, it was primarily subcortical areas that initially recognised the tone of the spoken words. In contrast, downstream cortex areas were responsible for decoding the content.
Hierarchical form of language processing
"Although language processing in humans is unique in many respects, this study reveals exciting similarities between us and a species without its own language," says Attila Andics. The hierarchical form of language processing that has now also been discovered in dogs is presumably based on a fundamental working principle of the brain: it is already known from numerous other areas that emotionally charged stimuli are recognised at the lower processing levels, while more complex information also requires more complex processing steps in the brain.
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