Dogs have been shown to have the same bias for recognition of speech and the tone of speech by different hemispheres of the brain as humans do. Victoria Ratcliffe and David Reby of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and colleagues are the first to show a definite bias in how dogs respond to sound.
Hearing in dogs is physically the same as in people. The sounds that are heard in the right ear are processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Sounds heard in the left ear are processed in the right side of the brain. The development is thought to be an evolutionary protection of the sense of hearing.
The researchers attempted to determine if dogs segregated content and volume of speech from humans into categories that went to different sides of the brain. The idea is that if one side of the dog’s brain is specialized for certain content then the opposite side ear should be the source that receives that type of content. The study determined that dogs have a hemispheric bias for speech from people.
Dogs have a left-hemisphere bias for familiar words spoken by a person that they know. Exaggerated and loud speech by people was processed in the right side of the dog’s brain. The same discrimination between content and volume is seen in people. A dog cannot get the full message of a speech but the research proves that dogs do listen and have a defined pattern of discrimination of content for speech from humans.
