Who’s a clever boy? Your dog really does know what you’re saying, and brain scans show how

Your dog gets you. He really gets you.

So say scientists in Hungary, who have published a groundbreaking study that found dogs understand both the meaning of words and the intonation used to speak them. Put simply: Even if you use a very excited tone of voice to tell the dog he’s going to the vet, he’ll probably see through you and be bummed about going.

It had already been established that dogs respond to human voices better than their wolf brethren, are able to match hundreds of objects to words, and can be directed by human speech. But the new findings mean dogs are more like humans than was previously known: They process language using the same regions of the brain as people, according to the researchers, whose paper was published in Science.

To determine this, Attila Andics and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest recruited 13 family dogs - mostly golden retrievers and border collies - and trained them to sit totally still for seven minutes in an fMRI scanner that measured their brain activity. The pups were not restrained, and they “could leave the scanner at any time,” the authors assured.

A female trainer familiar to the dogs then spoke words of praise that all their owners said they used - “that’s it”, “clever,” and “well done” - and neutral words such as “yet” and “if,” which the researchers believed were meaningless to the animals. Each dog heard each word in both a neutral tone and a happy, atta-boy tone.

Using the brain activity images, the researchers saw that the dogs processed the familiar words regardless of intonation, and they did so using the left hemisphere, just like humans. Tone, on the other hand, was analysed in the auditory regions of the right hemisphere - just as it is in people, the study said.