We do a lot of things with our dog; we eat with them, cuddle, play, sleep and even exercise with them to stay in shape. Since we spend most of our time around them, we might also want to consider cleaning up our language. A recent study has discovered that dog may learn language similar to the way their human owners learn language.
A new research conducted by Dr. Attila Andics, Adam Miklosi along with their other colleagues suggest that dogs understand what we say and how we talk to them, report NY Times.
Washington Post reports, a group of scientists discovered that certain regions of a dog's brain are activated while processing the meaning of a word. Even more astounding is that fact that the same regions are activated in human brain when processing speeach. For people, parts of the right hemisphere responds to the emotional content of a sound while the left hemisphere reacts to deciphering the meaning and the same goes for dogs.
During the study, a Hungarian trainer was invited to participate and he was instructed to utter words in a positive and neutral tone. As it turns out, when a praise such as "good boy" or "well done" were spoken in a positive tone, the reward system of a dog's brain light up. When the same praises were uttered in a neutral tone, it still garnered the same results which only means that our animal best friends are a lot smarter than we thought.
Dogs pay attention to what we say and we should be careful with the language we use around them. Although Dr. Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, weighed in on the the study. He was not involved in it, but he claims that the capacity to process meaning and emotion was an ability that had already evolved in non-primates. However, he thinks that the dogs had independently developed the same brain configuration and that the experiment was well done.
