According to neurobiologists at the MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Hungary, dogs do understand the way humans say things to them but there is very little evidence to support the idea that they understand what is said.

There have been reports of a few individual dogs that seem to actually know a few hundred words and even a border collie in the USA (where else!) who has learned over 1000! Even if these reports can be substantiated, these are exceptional animals, not your average canine.

Nevertheless, human understanding of the way the canine brain interprets sounds and particularly actual words, is by no means complete. Recent work here in the UK may be about to add considerably to that understanding.

A recent edition of “Current Biology,” reports that British psychologists have discovered that dogs do seem to pick up the actual meaning of the words we use. It seems that the information is processed in one part of the canine brain whereas what the scientists call, “emotional cues,” in the sound of speech are processed in a different part.

At the University of Sussex, a rather cunning experiment was set up. Having recruited 250 dogs, what breeds we are not told, they were set up in the laboratory with two audio speakers for each dog, one on either side of the animal’s head. How 250 dogs were persuaded to keep still long enough is also not revealed! However, they were and the experiment started with playing a recorded command through both speakers, spoken in a normal way and including both emotional cues and meaningful words.

Then the speech was manipulated in various ways, flat speech with no inflections, then just the inflections but no words or meaningless gibberish, recording which speaker the subjects’ heads turned towards in response to each different recording, left or right. Both speakers were producing the same sounds but a distinct pattern was observed in the dogs’ head movements.

When the commands contained just emotional cues, most of the 250 dogs, about 80%, turned their heads towards the left speaker. When the commands contained meaningful words, most turned towards the right speaker.

This seems to indicate that when the canine brain divides human speech, it processes meanings on the left side of the brain and cues on the right; opposite to the direction in which the head turns in response, just as in humans.

Humans process speech in a fairly similar manner; breaking down speech into several components; such as what the words the mean; what the speech tells us about the speaker and the emotional cues that we respond to. It is rather more complex in the case of humans but we are supposed to be a bit higher up in the evolutionary scale after all!

Some scientists believe that, even more surprisingly, the study also indicates that dogs do have the ability to differentiate between meaningful words and meaningless sounds.

The immediate benefit we can gain from this work is that it may help us to improve the way we communicate with our dogs. We just need to speak into the appropriate ear for what we wish to communicate. Remember to use the right ear when you want to communicate commands clearly and if you want to say something more emotional talk to the left ear.

Now, when someone discovers how humans can properly understand what dogs are saying to us, then we’ll be able to have really deep and meaningful conversations with our canine friends. Until then it is a bit of a one-sided conversation!