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If you are a dog, you know what it is like to bond with these lovely animals. You know they can understand not only what you tell them, but also the way you say it.
What you might not know, however, is how lacking in meaning they are when you communicate with them verbally. New research suggests dogs may be missing more than we think.
Despite excellent hearing and dogs’ ability to analyze and process different speech sounds, a new study by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, indicates that even minor differences can be missed by dogs , who fail to distinguish subtle variations between words of the same sound.
“While dogs have remarkable abilities for social cognition and communication, the number of words they learn to recognize generally remains very low,” the researchers explain in their article.
“The reason for this limited capacity is still unclear.”
To probe these limits of dogs’ auditory vocabulary (if you will), researchers conducted an experiment in which more than 40 dogs were brought to the lab, with their brain activity measured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes. ) attached to their scalp. .
When connected to the equipment, the animals heard three different types of words spoken on a recording: familiar instruction words (eg, “sit”), phonetically similar absurd words (eg “sut” ) and different nonsense words (eg. bep ‘).
The EEG results, based on a subset of 17 animals whose data were considered reliable, showed a marked difference in the dogs’ brain responses – called event-related potentials (ERP) – when they heard. familiar words or absurd words that sound different. .
Overall, however, the LES suggested that dogs were unable to distinguish between familiar instructions (such as “ sit ”) and similar sounding absurd terms (such as “ sut ”), given the phonetic overlap between them.
The researchers hypothesize that the limitation is not due to insufficient perceptual discrimination – as dogs were previously able to identify subtle changes in the sounds of human speech – but might reflect something on how animals focus their attention.
Young infants, the researchers note, also fail to distinguish between very similar sounding words when they are very young (less than 14 months), but later learn to distinguish slight changes in phonetics. which underlies the human ability to possess large vocabularies. .
For some reason – which future research might be able to elucidate – it seems dogs don’t get past this hurdle, not paying attention to all of the speech sounds that make up words.
This could explain why dogs tend to learn only a limited number of human words, but it could also mean that they don’t understand humans as much as humans might think: similar words could trip them up, be seen in their brain as the same thing.
“As in the case of human infants, we assume that the similarity of the dogs’ brain activity for the instruction words they know and for similar absurd words does not reflect perceptual constraints but rather ‘attention and treatment,’ says lead researcher Attila Andics.
“Dogs may not pay attention to all the details of the sound of speech when listening to words.”
The results are reported in Royal Society Open Science.
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