How Dogs Understand What We Say

Scientists — and anyone who lives with a canine — know that dogs pay close attention to the emotion in our voices. They listen for whether our tone is friendly or mean, how the pitch goes up or down and even the rhythms in our speech.

But what about the meaning of the words we say?

Sure, a few studies have reported on super smart dogs that know hundreds of words. And Chaser, a border collie in South Carolina, even learned 1,022 nouns and commands to go with them.

But otherwise, there's little evidence that dogs differentiate between speech with meaningful words from sounds that contain only inflections, says neurobiologistAttila Andics, at the MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Budapest.

"We know quite a bit about how much dogs get about how we say things, Andics says, "but we know quite little about how much dogs get about what we say to them."

That's about to change.

Psychologists reported Wednesday in the journal Current Biology that dogs do pay attention to the meaning of words. And they process that information in a different part of the brain than where they process emotional cues in speech.

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