For thousands of years, dog owners have sworn their four-legged friends understand every word they say.
Now scientists have discovered that dogs’ brains really do adapt to the sound of human speech.
A new study has found dogs brains can change just listening to people - allowing them to break up our speech into individual words in a similar way to humans.
It is the first time this type of speech processing has been found in the brain of any species other than mankind.
Scientists believe dogs may develop the ability simply because they spend so much of their lives listening to us.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, could help explain why a pet appears to pick out particular words from the endless chatter going on around them.
Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, compared the brain activity of 20 pet dogs with 20 humans as they listened to specially created streams of speech to find out if dogs’ brains could spot ‘words’ in a continuous flow of sounds.
They discovered dogs’ brains were able to find recurring word patterns in the speech they heard - just like humans.
In particular, the dogs homed in on consonants - the sounds which provide much of the basic structure of words. Humans do the same thing from infancy, a phenomenon scientists call “consonant bias”.
Professor Attila Andics, a neuroscientist and co-author of the study said: “Although vowels are louder and more noticeable, consonants usually form the skeleton of words.
“In a continuous speech stream, it is easier to detect individual words when we focus on consonants.”
Scientists have long wondered whether our ability to make sense of speech exists because the human brain is uniquely built for language - or whether constantly hearing people talk helps train the brain to process it.
Dogs offered an unusual way to find out.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
- Elephants found to forage and mix their own medicines
- Newly discovered fossils suggest giant marine dinosaur came to coastline to vomit
- Long-lost tomb of Egypt's Nefertiti could be hidden behind King Tut's in huge unexplored complex
They can spend virtually their entire lives surrounded by human conversation despite being unable to speak themselves.
During the experiment, dogs and people listened to streams of speech without pauses telling them where one word stopped, and another began.
Researchers monitored their brain activity using electrodes placed on the scalp and the dogs’ brains behaved in a similar way to ours.
When recurring word patterns were based on consonants, both human and dog brains locked on to the rhythm of the hidden words.
Researchers also detected a distinctive change in brain activity separating continuous speech into individual words in the same split-second period associated with the human brain - around 400 milliseconds after each word began.
Kinga Tóth, a psychologist and co- author of the study, said: “This is the first evidence that a consonant bias can also emerge in the brain of a species other than humans.”
A dog's ability to detect words could develop even if they had spent their first three months away from humans - for example on the street or in shelters, the scientists discovered, suggesting repeatedly hearing humans talk is enough to change the way a dog’s brain works.
“These findings suggest the brain’s tuning to speech does not require a pre-wired brain and human-like language abilities,” the study concludes, it added: “Instead, regular exposure to speech may be enough to change how the brain functions and to give rise to processing characteristics previously observed only in humans - even in a species evolutionarily distant from us.”
However, the research showed humans are able process speech in finer detail, picking up individual speech sounds, while dogs appeared to process it in larger chunks or syllables.
The study may help understanding of the extraordinary way humans understand speech - scientists have long assumed some of the way humans process speech is tied to our unique ability to use language.
The findings suggest exposure may play a bigger part than previously thought.
Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter
from GB News https://ift.tt/PtkFlzQ
For thousands of years, dog owners have sworn their four-legged friends understand every word they say.
Now scientists have discovered that dogs’ brains really do adapt to the sound of human speech.
A new study has found dogs brains can change just listening to people - allowing them to break up our speech into individual words in a similar way to humans.
It is the first time this type of speech processing has been found in the brain of any species other than mankind.
Scientists believe dogs may develop the ability simply because they spend so much of their lives listening to us.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, could help explain why a pet appears to pick out particular words from the endless chatter going on around them.
Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, compared the brain activity of 20 pet dogs with 20 humans as they listened to specially created streams of speech to find out if dogs’ brains could spot ‘words’ in a continuous flow of sounds.
They discovered dogs’ brains were able to find recurring word patterns in the speech they heard - just like humans.
In particular, the dogs homed in on consonants - the sounds which provide much of the basic structure of words. Humans do the same thing from infancy, a phenomenon scientists call “consonant bias”.
Professor Attila Andics, a neuroscientist and co-author of the study said: “Although vowels are louder and more noticeable, consonants usually form the skeleton of words.
“In a continuous speech stream, it is easier to detect individual words when we focus on consonants.”
Scientists have long wondered whether our ability to make sense of speech exists because the human brain is uniquely built for language - or whether constantly hearing people talk helps train the brain to process it.
Dogs offered an unusual way to find out.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
- Elephants found to forage and mix their own medicines
- Newly discovered fossils suggest giant marine dinosaur came to coastline to vomit
- Long-lost tomb of Egypt's Nefertiti could be hidden behind King Tut's in huge unexplored complex
They can spend virtually their entire lives surrounded by human conversation despite being unable to speak themselves.
During the experiment, dogs and people listened to streams of speech without pauses telling them where one word stopped, and another began.
Researchers monitored their brain activity using electrodes placed on the scalp and the dogs’ brains behaved in a similar way to ours.
When recurring word patterns were based on consonants, both human and dog brains locked on to the rhythm of the hidden words.
Researchers also detected a distinctive change in brain activity separating continuous speech into individual words in the same split-second period associated with the human brain - around 400 milliseconds after each word began.
Kinga Tóth, a psychologist and co- author of the study, said: “This is the first evidence that a consonant bias can also emerge in the brain of a species other than humans.”
A dog's ability to detect words could develop even if they had spent their first three months away from humans - for example on the street or in shelters, the scientists discovered, suggesting repeatedly hearing humans talk is enough to change the way a dog’s brain works.
“These findings suggest the brain’s tuning to speech does not require a pre-wired brain and human-like language abilities,” the study concludes, it added: “Instead, regular exposure to speech may be enough to change how the brain functions and to give rise to processing characteristics previously observed only in humans - even in a species evolutionarily distant from us.”
However, the research showed humans are able process speech in finer detail, picking up individual speech sounds, while dogs appeared to process it in larger chunks or syllables.
The study may help understanding of the extraordinary way humans understand speech - scientists have long assumed some of the way humans process speech is tied to our unique ability to use language.
The findings suggest exposure may play a bigger part than previously thought.
Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter
0 Comments
Don't share any link