Dogs have remained the best and most reliable form of company during a time of social isolation and stay-at-home orders.
Whether we're complaining about the difficulties of working from home, the few extra pounds COVID-19 has caused, or even having a late-night chat with a glass of wine, our furry little friends are always there to lend a listening ear.
Dog owners can now sleep a little easier after a new study has revealed that dogs cannot not understand what their human friends are telling them.
Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest found that in spite of their “human-like” hearing abilities, dogs do not detect subtle differences between words in the way that humans do, according to CNN.
Researchers measured the brain activity of family dogs using a technique called electroencephalography, which involved taping electrodes to the animal’s heads.
Researchers played the dogs words they knew, such as “sit,” along with similar but nonsense words like “sut,” and then very different nonsense words, like “bep.”
Experts found that dogs, who had never been trained in the experiment, could quickly tell the difference between the known instruction words and the very different nonsense words.
The dogs, however, could not tell the difference between known words and similar-sounding nonsense words. The dogs simply processed these words as the same word, Magyari, a postdoctoral researcher at the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, told CNN.
Related
"They may just not realize that all details, the speech sounds, are really important in human speech. If you think of a normal dog: That dog is able to learn only a few instructions in its life," she said.
Despite a dog’s inability to detect a wide variety of human language, Magyari says her findings prove that despite previous studies, dogs do in fact listen to human speech.
"It really shows that dogs can differentiate the words that they know from nonsense words," she said, noting that family dogs registered brain activity even when listening to instruction words delivered by an unfamiliar voice and through a speaker.
LISTEN NOW on the RADIO.COM App
Follow RADIO.COM
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram