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Scientists discover pets' brains understand human speech

gbnews.com · 1h · first reportShare

For thousands of years, dog owners have sworn their four-legged friends understand every word they say. Now scientists have discovered that dogs’ brains really do adapt to the sound of human speech. A new study has found dogs brains can change just listening to people - allowing them to break up our speech into individual words in a similar way to humans. It is the first time this type of speech processing has been found in the brain of any species other than mankind. TRENDING Stories Videos Your Say Scientists believe dogs may develop the ability simply because they spend so much of their lives listening to us. The discovery, published in the journal Science, could help explain why a pet appears to pick out particular words from the endless chatter going on around them. Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, compared the brain activity of 20 pet dogs with 20 humans as they listened to specially created streams of speech to find out if dogs’ brains could spot ‘wo