Do dogs understand what we’re saying to them?

Ever gotten the feeling that your dog is listening not just to what you say, but how you say it? You’re not alone among pet owners — and a new study in Science suggests that you’re not wrong, either.

Using fMRI machines, researchers measured the brain activity of dogs as they were given commands. Attila Andics, a neuroscientist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and one of the paper’s authors, says the team found that dogs process vocabulary and intonation in different parts of their brains, similar to the way humans do.

“We said ‘Good boy! Good boy!’ [to the dogs],” Andics says. “But we also said ‘Good boy, good boy’ without the praising intonation. And … we used meaningless conjuncture words like 'however' or nevertheless' in a praising intonation — and also some of these meaningless words in a normal intonation. And so we basically we could test for the differences in the brain.”

When the dogs heard praising words in praising intonations, the reward centers of their brain were active, indicating pleasure. This wasn’t the case when praise words were spoken neutrally, Andics says, or when meaningless words were spoken in a praising voice. The findings indicate that dogs can take communication cues straight from our speech.

“It's as if you are calling your dog on the phone,” Andics says. “[In the study,] they only have the speech information, and they don't see you or they don't see your body gestures. They don't have all the context. This is only word meaning and intonation which is at play here. So we were really surprised to see that they can, in this setting, actually use both of these types of cues.”

Alexandra Horowitz, a Barnard College professor and author of the forthcoming book "Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell,"is careful to add that while the study shows dogs can be trained to react to our speech, we still can’t say for certain that dogs understand words in the same way that we do.

“There is no question that they're able to extract something,” Horowitz says. “Maybe the meaning, maybe they recognized the familiar word. These meaningful words were all familiar words that [researchers] saw the left hemispheric activation in. So maybe they recognize that those are familiar, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily have the same kind of understanding as we would say a human would.”

Nevertheless, Andics and Horowitz agree that the study has cracked open new clues in our understanding of canine-human relationships. For instance, the research strongly suggests that your dog won’t fall for the old “Let’s go to the vet!” tricks — dogs have been studying us for too long.

“Dogs learn these associations much better than we think,” Horowitz says. “They see where we're going before we're going there. As long as they live with us and follow our habits, I think they're kind of anthropologists in our homes, watching us. So we can't be surprised when they know that they're actually going to the vet.”

If dogs and humans have similar mechanisms for processing speech, what’s keeping us from communicating better with other mammals? Andics says that the brain mechanism observed in this study probably dates back some 100 million years, to the last common ancestor of dogs and humans. It may be present in other mammals, but other mammals — your insolent pet cat, for example — just may not care as much about communicating with you.

“This is what's special about dogs,” Andics says. “I think that they care about what we communicate, what we want to communicate. They want to get something from our speech. And this is what makes them able to learn from our words. So they might not have a very different brain from other mammals, but they just live in the same environment. They got used to paying attention to us humans, so they have the opportunity to actually get familiarized with our words. They have the opportunity to learn much more from our speech than other animals who just don't care.”

Watch Science Friday’s video from the Westminster dog show — and learn more about the science of dogs — on the Science Friday website: www.sciencefriday.com/dogs.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.