New Scientist
Image: Adventures with my dogs
Our best friends really are good listeners. Dogs have probably ranked as our top companions for more than 30,000 years – new evidence that they can extract plenty of meaning from human speech may explain how they have held on to the number one spot for so long.
Our two cerebral hemispheres neatly divide the labour when we process language: the left hemisphere tunes into the phonemes in speech that combine to form words; the right hemisphere focuses on prosody – the rhythm and intonation of words – which can carry emotional information.
Many mammals, including dogs, show similar kinds of hemispheric biases when processing the calls made by members of their respective species – which made Victoria Ratcliffe and David Reby at the University of Sussex in Falmer, UK, wonder whether domestic dogs have learned to process human speech the same way. Read more on newscientist.com…
