Dog Brains Process Human Speech The Way Humans Do

All the better for hearing you with. Boris Roessler/EPA

By Victoria Ratcliffe, University of Sussex and David Reby, University of Sussex

Sometimes it may seem like your dog doesn’t want to listen.

But in our study, however, we’ve found that he may understand more than he lets on.

Human speech is complex, communicating not only words but also tone, as well as information about the speaker such as their gender and identity. To what extent can a dog pick up on these different cues?

It’s well established that in humans the left hemisphere of the brain processes meaningful verbal content, as encoded in the fast-changing stream of audible sound. The brain’s right hemisphere, meanwhile, is more strongly associated with other information the voice carries, such as emotional tone – encoded in the voice’s slow-changing or static layers of sound.

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