Have you ever looked at videos of huskies ‘talking’ back to their owners? Even though their responses seem to be interpreted by their human companions (and we are not sure if that’s what these energetic beings are really telling them), isn’t it interesting that these dogs reply as if they really understood?
Research now suggests that dogs actually know what we’re talking about. The study, done at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, discovered that dogs can figure out that the sounds humans make are words. These animals can figure out that a group of syllables is often spoken by their companions as words, which is a similar behavior observed in human infants.
“This is the first time that we show that a non-human mammal can do this,” says Mariana Boros, one of the lead authors of the study. “[Dogs] can apply the exact same computations that infants are doing to segment the speech.”
Image credit: Nataliia Kvitovska/Unsplash
#Dogs #Understanding #HumanSpeech #Science