Dogs Listen and Understand Human Speech for Content and Meaning

If you think your dog knows what you’re saying, you’re probably right. Dogs know not only what we say, but the emotion with which we`ve said it.

Research from the University of Sussex in England published in Current Biology, November 2014, showed that dogs listen both for content and for emotion. In this way, dogs listen just as humans do. And like humans, dogs use the right hemisphere to process the emotion of what is said and the left hemisphere to process word meaning.

Victoria Ratcliffe and her colleagues from School of Psychology tested dogs by manipulating human speech so that it was either easy to understand the meaning or it was easy to understand the emotion of what was said. When dogs experienced easily understood emotional content, they processed the sound with the right hemisphere. When dogs experienced the clear, emotionless words, they processed the sound with the left hemisphere.

You can see this in your own dog. A dog that is predominately processing emotion turns its head left, while a dog processing the meaning turns its head to the right. This head turning makes sense because most of the nerves from the left ear cross to carry sound to the right hemisphere, and the majority of nerves from the right ear cross to carry sound to the left hemisphere.

Although it`s cute to see a dog turn its head or cock its ear when listening, we make it easiest for dogs to understand what we`re saying when we combine both meaning and emotion with our commands. A dog processing speech that is both full of emotion and clear meaning, doesn`t need to turn its head. It gets the message using all of its brain.

Share this post