#Honden understand praising words in the same way as people — and that's important
Dogs can't talk and yet their brain reacts to pronounced words. That suggests that human language has deep evolutionary roots. Dogs, which have been developing for ten thousand years as they hang out with humans, are especially sensitive to our emotions.


Every dog owner knows that his or her pet wags fierce when pronouncing Brave Dog! with a cheerful voice at a high pitch. That aroused the curiosity of scientists. What exactly happens in a dog's brain when the animal hears words of praise? And is that process the same as the hierarchical way our own brain processes such acoustic information?

When a man receives a compliment, the more primitive, subcortical auditory areas first respond to the intonation, the emotional charge of speech. Then the brain switches to the more recently developed auditory cortex to find out the learned meaning of the words.

In 2016, a research team discovered that the dog brain, like that of humans, processes the intonation and meaning of a word separately, although dogs use their right hemisphere and we use our left hemisphere. But one question remained unresolved: does the dog brain process approving words using the same steps?

“That's an important question, because dogs can't talk but respond correctly to our words,” says Attila Andics. The neuroscientist of the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest participated in both the previous and the new research, about which an article recently appeared in the journal Scientific Reports. For example, some dogs are able to recognize thousands of names of different objects and can link the name to a specific object.

Read more on National Geographic: Dogs understand praising words