Dog brains process both what we say and how we say it

 

The first study to investigate how dog brains process speech shows that our best friends in the animal kingdom care about both what we say and how we say it. Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, a right hemisphere brain region to process intonation¹, and praising activates³ dog's reward center only when both words and intonation match, according to a study in Science. The findings of a Hungarian research group suggest that the neural⁴ mechanisms⁵ to process words evolved much earlier than previously⁶ thought, and they are not unique to the human brain, the researchers say. It shows that if an environment is rich in speech, as is the case of family dogs, word meaning representations can arise in the brain, even in a non-primate mammal that is not able to speak.
第一项调查狗的大脑如何处理语言的研究表明，我们在动物界最好的朋友关心我们说什么和我们怎么说。根据《科学》杂志的一项研究，狗和人一样，使用左半脑处理单词，使用右半脑处理语调，只有当单词和语调匹配时，赞扬才会激活狗的奖励中枢。研究人员表示，匈牙利一个研究小组的发现表明，处理单词的神经机制比以前认为的进化得更早，而且它们并非人类大脑独有。研究表明，如果处在一个有丰富的语言环境中，就像家里的狗一样，即使是不会说话的非灵长类哺乳动物，大脑中也会出现词义表征。

 

"During speech processing, there is a well-known distribution of labor⁷ in the human brain. It is mainly the left hemisphere's job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere's job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyzes⁸ what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified⁹ meaning. Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms," said lead researcher Attila Andics of Department of Ethology and MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
“在语音处理过程中，人类大脑中有一个众所周知的劳动分布。它主要是左半球处理词义的工作，而右半球处理语调的工作。人类大脑不仅分别分析我们说的是什么和说的语气，而且还整合了这两种信息，以获得统一的含义。”

 

"We measured dogs' brain activity as they listened to their trainer's speech," explains Anna Gábor, PhD student, author of the study. "Dogs heard praise words in praising intonation, praise words in neutral intonation, and also neutral conjunction words, meaningless to them, in praising and neutral intonations¹⁰. We looked for brain regions that differentiated¹¹ between meaningful and meaningless words, or between praising and non-praising intonations."
“我们测量了狗在听训练师演讲时的大脑活动。”。“狗在赞美语调中听到赞美词，在中性语调中听到赞扬词，在赞美和中性语调中也听到对它们没有意义的中性连词。我们寻找区分有意义和无意义的词，或赞美和非赞美语调的大脑区域。”

 

The brain activation¹² images showed that dogs prefer to use their left hemisphere to process meaningful but not meaningless words. This left bias¹³ was present for weak and strong levels of brain activations as well, and it was independent of intonation. Dogs activate² a right hemisphere brain area to tell apart praising and non-praising intonation. This was the same auditory brain region that this group of researchers previously found in dogs for processing emotional non-speech sounds from both dogs and humans, suggesting that intonation processing mechanisms are not specific to speech.

 

Importantly, the reward center was active only when dogs heard praise words in praising intonation. "It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match. So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation¹⁴ of what those words really meant. Again, this is very similar to what human brains do," Andics said.

 

This study is the first step to understanding how dogs interpret human speech, and these results can also help to make communication and cooperation between dogs and humans even more efficient, the researchers say.
研究人员表示，这项研究是了解狗如何解读人类语言的第一步，这些结果也有助于提高狗与人类之间的沟通与合作效率。

 

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