Dogs are able to pick out individual words from continuous speech like human infants can.
Even without knowing what they mean, infants can recognise new words by noticing syllable patterns in speech, so at E枚tv枚s Lor谩nd University in Budapest, Hungary, and her colleagues wanted to find out if dogs can do the same.
The researchers used electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the brain activity of 19 dogs. They then played the dogs a stream of three-syllable words from a made-up language, to ensure that the animals were hearing the words for the first time, as well as sounds that weren鈥檛 words.
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By comparing the dogs鈥� brain activity as they listened to the different recordings, the team found that they were paying attention to how often certain syllables occurred together, suggesting that they extract individual words from the speech.
This ability to recognise separate syllables has been seen in infants as young as eight months old, when they segment speech while learning their first language.
But language doesn鈥檛 just involve being able to recognise individual words: it has more complex rules, says Boros. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know if dogs will be able to follow those ones too.鈥�
鈥淭his is really just taking another brick down from that wall that says humans are so special,鈥� says at the University of Lincoln, UK. 鈥淭he fact that dogs can do this tells us a little bit about language evolution. It kind of fits into this building body of evidence that we have that other animals are communicating in more complex ways than we鈥檇 given them credit for.鈥�
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