Studies have shown that dogs can really understand people talking
Published:
2019-07-02 15:40
Source:

According to foreign media reports, a new study shows that our best partners can not only hear the meaning of human language, but also understand the emotions behind the language. The study's co-author, Victoria Ratcliffe, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, said that although the latest findings did not confirm that dogs fully understand all the emotions behind human language, they at least noticed.
Dogs will sit down, lie down, and wag their tails according to human instructions and intimacy. Although the dog-loving family believes that their little pets can understand every word of theirs, skeptics insist that dogs only act according to people's intonation or other non-verbal cues.
In fact, previous studies have shown that dogs can respond to human movements, gaze or other nonverbal communication, which makes it difficult to determine what words they can understand.
To determine the dog's brain reaction when humans spoke, Ratcliffe and her colleagues brought 250 pet dogs to the lab. Ratcliffe said that the sound heard by the dog's right ear is processed in the left brain, so when the dog turns to the right, it can be determined that its left hemisphere plays an important role in the processing of sound.
The researchers processed the dog's language and played it to the dog. The researchers found that when a dog hears a language that does not contain emotions, it turns its head to the right, which indicates that the left brain is processing these languages. But when the dog hears words that contain emotions, it turns heads to the left, which indicates that language processing is taking place in their right brain.
According to Ratcliffe, this shows that dogs are similar to humans in terms of linguistic processing. Humans also deal with language in the left brain, and the right brain processes emotional information. At least they seem to understand both language and emotion. However, researchers are still not sure how much the dog understands, which is the area they will continue to explore in the future.
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