The authors of the study checked whether dogs can distinguish ordered combinations of vowels and consonants in speech and automatically identify words. To do this, they invited two dozen volunteers and their dogs to take part.
During the experiments, humans and animals listened to recordings of human speech with special sets of vowel or consonant sounds, as well as random combinations of syllables. The participants’ brain activity was recorded with electroencephalographs.
It turned out that the brains of both dogs and humans synchronized activity in a special way when listening to recordings with ordered sets of consonant sounds. There was no such effect with ordered sets of vowel sounds or with random sequences of syllables.
Atilla Andics, a senior researcher at the University of Budapest, whom the university’s press service quoted, said that the brain’s ability to tune in to speech sounds and distinguish vowels and consonants does not require the ability to speak. According to him, frequent exposure to speech sounds changes dogs’ brains so much that typically “human” characteristics appear in their functioning.
Andics and his colleagues have been studying the intellectual abilities of smart dogs for many years, many of which became known on the internet thanks to their ability to understand their owners’ speech. Earlier observations showed that dogs understand the intonations and meanings of words spoken by their owners, and also recognize emotions on the faces of familiar and unfamiliar people.
In the new study, Hungarian neurophysiologists tested another typically human ability — breaking speech into words and automatically distinguishing vowels and consonants. They concluded that the data obtained point to dogs’ brains’ ability to divide human speech into separate words based on consonant sounds.
