Dog brains, just as human brains, process speech hierarchically: intonations at lower, word meanings at higher stages.

Human brains process lexical meaning separately from the emotional prosody of speech at higher levels of the processing hierarchy. Dog brains can also dissociate lexical and emotional prosodic information in human spoken words. However, little is known on what is going on in their minds during these.

To better understand the neural dynamics of lexical processing in the dog brain, a new study by Hungarian researchers at the Department of Ethology, Faculty of Science, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) used functional MRI on awake dogs. Dogs listened to known, praise words (clever, well done, that’s it) and unknown, neutral words (such, as if, yet) both in praising and neutral intonation.

Anna Gábor, the postdoctoral researcher at the MTA-ELTE ‘Lendület’ Neuroethology of Communication Research Group, lead author of the study, explains, “Exploring speech processing similarities and differences between dog and human brains can help a lot in understanding the steps that led to the emergence of speech during evolution. Human brains process speech hierarchically: first, intonations at lower-, next, word meanings at higher stages. Some years ago, we discovered that dog brains, just as human brains, separate intonation, and word meaning.”

“But is the hierarchy also similar? To find it out, we used a special technique this time: we measured how dog brain activity decreases to repeatedly played stimuli. During brain scanning, sometimes we repeated words, sometimes intonations. A stronger decrease in a given brain region to certain repetitions shows the region’s involvement.”[…]

Continue reading: Study reveals exciting speech processing similarities between humans and dogs