Your dog understands much more than you thought

A new study published in Science reveals that dogs identify word boundaries by focusing on consonants, a strategy also known in human infants. Researchers tested twenty dogs and twenty humans and found similar brain activity patterns in response to consonant patterns, even in dogs not exposed to early human speech.

A new study published in the journal Science reveals that dogs use the same strategy as human infants to identify words within a stream of speech: they listen to consonants to understand when one word ends and the next begins. The researchers, led by Attila Andics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, brought twenty dogs and twenty humans to the lab and played sequences of nonsense words. Some words contained consonant patterns, some vowel patterns, and some had no pattern at all. Electroencephalography data showed increased brain activity in response to consonant patterns even in dogs not exposed to early human speech. Francis Subiaul, a researcher at George Washington University not involved in the study, speculates that domestication is the decisive factor for this ability. Amrita Malikarjun from Harvard University concluded that the findings shed light on the shared history of the two species.

Your dog understands much more than you thought