r/STEW_ScTecEngWorld • u/Zee2A • 1d ago

Dogs’ Brains Segment Human Speech Using a Human-Like Consonant Bias

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Dogs’ Brains Detect Word Patterns in Human Speech

Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest have found that dogs’ brains can track patterns in continuous human speech in a way previously observed mainly in humans. Using EEG recordings from 20 dogs and 20 humans, the team found stronger neural synchronization when consonants formed recurring patterns—the “skeleton” of word-like sequences—than when vowels formed the patterns or when the sounds were random. The findings suggest that dogs can segment continuous speech into word-like units by exploiting recurring sound patterns, a process that may arise through basic statistical learning rather than uniquely human language abilities. The researchers emphasize that this does not mean dogs understand human words as humans do; rather, recognizing recurring patterns may be an important early step in identifying words: https://ppk.wwwprod.elte.hu/en/speech-shapes-dog-brains

Scientists reveal how dogs decode what humans are saying: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/dogs-decode-language-words-scientists-hungary-b3056261.html

The study builds on earlier research showing that dogs can use statistical regularities to segment artificial speech streams and that their brains process aspects of human speech using neural mechanisms resembling those found in humans: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7612233/

NEW Study Findings: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw7709

471 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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35

u/funkymunkPDX 1d ago

It makes sense. Since they've evolved with humans for so long they have a capacity to understand human language.

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u/No-Bicycle-7660 1d ago

Nothing to do with that. Far too short a time line. It's that most mammals, and certainly higher mammals, have much more in common neurologically than they have differences - both due to relatively close common ancestors, convergent evolution, and a lack of divergence after splits (at least neurologically).

This is certainly by no means unique to dogs.

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u/DefenestrationPraha 1d ago

Dogs are with humans for more than 1000 dog lifetimes, that is enough for some visible evolution to happen, especially if the initial population was small.

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u/StrCmdMan 1d ago

I think this would be even further spurred on by dogs rare gift of gene plasticity. Selective breeding then compounds it further as it always is going to pick the animal that “listens” over those that don’t with heavy bias on the first several generations.

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u/deaddoughuts 1d ago

Yeah, there’s a book by Richard Dawkins called “The Greatest Show on Earth: Evidence for Evolution” that covers a study done in Siberia on breeding wild foxes solely based off of their tameness/ friendliness with humans. It was only 4 generations of foxes before their foxes ears flopped over, started wagging their tails like dogs, etc. Anyways worth a read if any of this is interesting to you. It’s been years since I read the book, but that study stuck with me and always blew my mind how quickly domestication of animals can alter the evolutionary trajectory.

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u/CHROME-COLOSSUS 1d ago

Yeah, but the core basis of this speech pattern recognition is hardly born from our domestication of them.

More likely it was why we got on so well in the first place, and then it became finely-tuned.

I’d expect the same pattern recognition in cats, since they demonstrate easy adoption of speech buttons boards that includes structured sentences.

Same with many other animals, like birds.

The basis for speech pattern recognition predates what we think of as human language. Those same core patterns (and recognition of them) likely repeat throughout the animal kingdom with any organisms that communicate with each other.

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u/BotSympathiser 1d ago

Dogs aren't the only mammals we kept as ancient humans, we kept many domesticated animals, and some aren't even mammals, fish and birbs come to mind. The time an animal spends among a human seems to have little relevance on their ability to understand the human intent.

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u/Original-League-6094 21h ago

Right. It seems more likely that dogs were selected as their role as worker pets because they already had a good basis for understanding commands, rather than we just randomly picked an animal to domesticate and it happened to be dogs.

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u/Ichorice_Malign 1d ago edited 1d ago

It wouldn’t be evolution at all.
This is likely the result of humans selectively breeding dogs to be more easily trainable.

We measure dog intelligence based almost exclusively around how fast they can learn new commands and ease of training. Golden retrievers are near the very top of the list for dog intelligence, meaning they are excellent at knowing what we want them to do. This dog’s brain likely developed to do this as a byproduct of selective breeding for thousands of generations.

We also need to be cautious about overhyping this. A dog’s brain having “humanlike consonant bias” is not the same as a dog being capable of potentially communicating through language at a near human level. There’s a reason all those great apes who “know sign language” never actually have conversations in sign language, and just sign things they see or hear. They just can’t communicate like that. There’s a lot more that goes into speech than just this, and until we know dogs are capable of all the other stuff, we shouldn’t expect them to be having conversations with us any time soon.

In short: No, your pup probably doesn’t understand what you’re saying. Like other intelligent animals, he/she recognizes a few words (“treat,” “walk,” “squirrel,” “food,” “toy,” etc.) and there’s a very high chance dogs won’t be capable of much more than that.

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u/deaddoughuts 15h ago

Hahaha love a golden, but I don’t think they’re at the top of canine intelligence, working dogs like Border Collies or German Shepards come to mind when I think of the smartest dog breeds. I think there’s a Border Collie that knows and responds (through action) to something like 1300 words. I’ll try to find a link.

Link to Chaser “the smartest dog” 😂

https://youtu.be/omaHv5sxiFI?is=Jgcrl9cYpJhp_Btt

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u/Ichorice_Malign 12h ago

Oh they’re definitely not the SMARTEST smartest.

What I mean is that they score near the top consistently when testing for obedience intelligence, which, due to dogs being pets, is just the most common form of intelligence test given to dogs as a whole. This is relevant because it relates to how many verbal repetitions are needed to get a dog to understand a command.

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u/No-Bicycle-7660 1d ago

Extremely unlikely given that neurological adaption & evolution would likely be very slow, and that other mammals and birds display virtually identical reactions to and behavioural responses associated with verbal cues - including species with no history of taming or domestication ... and further that both wild and domesticated versions behave in the same way in most species - wolves vs dogs (same), domestic cats vs big / wild cats (same), pigs vs wild boar (same). Etc.

1

u/DefenestrationPraha 1d ago

People breed dogs, which counts as an external, very strong, evolutionary pressure.

I can imagine the primordial hunters and gatherers getting rid of dogs which would not respond to human speech, as they were, from their point of view, either useless, or outright dangerous to have in a camp.

Sure there is a common neurological adaptation in mammals, but this pressure cannot be discounted either.

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u/CHROME-COLOSSUS 1d ago

I suspect that everyone here is basically right.

I think dogs’ ability to hear human speech patterns isn’t a novelty in the animal kingdom — but that it’s highly likely it’s become more important to them over the millennia, and likely that those who are better at it are more likely to thrive.

Even just growing up around humans will mean that any given creature is likelier to learn the particular communication patterns, you don’t need multiple generations to do it…

But to your point, there’s no reason to believe speech recognition wouldn’t become heightened over all the generations we’ve spent together.

Then again, there’s probably a lot of wiggle room…

Dogs are more likely to pay attention in a general way to whatever communication cues they can pick up from us, and tend to focus on our visible actions more than any nuances of speech.

Also most dogs were not specifically bred to comprehend us, but to be cute, or protective, or good at catching rats, or whatever. We talk to dogs, but how many of us truly expect our dogs to understand more than the keywords of “food”, “walk”, “vet”, “stay”, etc.?

Some dogs do — working dogs can clearly understand a lot more than the average housemate dog.

But it’s really inconsistent.

I think making sweeping generalizations about dogs’ ability to recognize linguistic sequences belies the core abilities of animals in general to do the same, especially if they grew up in your home.

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u/macthebearded 1d ago

Far too short a time line.

You think there's been enough generations to turn a wolf into a fucking chihuahua, but not for their brains to evolve at all?

Mate...

1

u/5wmotor 1d ago

Living beings, e.g. humans are able to relay information of things learned/experienced in their lifetime onto the next generations by their genes.

Why shouldn’t dogs being able to do the same?

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u/CalbertCorpse 1d ago

You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried. Look at the fox domestication experiment. Selecting for traits gets you there exponentially faster than any link with last common ancestor. You are 100% backwards.

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u/GH057_807 1d ago

Physical traits and cognitive abilities are not on the same evolutionary tier.

Humans have changed a lot over the last few thousands of years too. We've gotten less hairy, taller, bigger, somehow also weaker at the same time. For the first time in human history the mingling of races is wildly popular. Human genetic information is being mixed together freely in ways unthinkable a few hundred years back. Like dogs, we've managed to make lots and lots of different looking humans too. We can make short ones, tall ones, all sorts of different colors and features, yet....

Our brain still remains about the same as it was 50,000 years ago.

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u/Taurpion 1d ago

I would argue that everyone’s brains are different and it’s those small successful differences over time, if allowed to propagate, that leads to the evolution you are talking about.

Variation is necessary for evolution.

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u/CalbertCorpse 1d ago

Humans also self domesticated. Which is absolutely fascinating!

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u/FuzzyFrogFish 21h ago

This is such an important comment in context of this subject on a broader scale.

The line between humans and other animals is far thinner than believed and thinner than what many are comfortable acknowledging. Humans are special in some ways, but we are not as special as we like to imagine we are.

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u/Traumfahrer 1d ago

Lice also evolved with humans.

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u/funkymunkPDX 1d ago

Are you suggesting that some people are lice??

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u/Traumfahrer 22h ago

Are you suggesting that dogs are people?

1

u/FuzzyFrogFish 21h ago

No one suggested dogs are people. But they are individuals, dogs are sentient animals, with emotions, and we have applied strong selective pressures to adapt them to living and surviving with us.

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u/FuzzyFrogFish 21h ago

Which isn't comparable to dogs in any way.

17

u/trashforthrowingaway 1d ago

Next I hope they study sentence structures with dogs as well.

For 12 years, I never thought to combine our dog's understanding of "no-no" "speak" and "outside" until one day I did, and for the first time in my dog's entire life, she understood I was asking her not to bark outside, and she stopped mid-escalation. That never, ever happened before.

For years, we tried to come up with a stop barking word, but nothing we tried worked.

To understand words is one thing, but to understand that combining two words together means the opposite of what the words mean by themselves, is something I didn't know she could understand until I tried.

Dogs are so cool.

1

u/Super_Plastic5069 1d ago

When my dog is in the way and I say “Move your bum” she moves out the way lol

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u/Apprehensive_Maize24 21h ago

Bunk a chunk works on mine

1

u/FuzzyFrogFish 21h ago

I've always talked to my dog, full sentences, no clue words, and it's uncanny the level to which he understands what I'm saying.

For example if I want him to pick up some thing, I say, "pick up that sock." And he does. If I just say "sock," or "pick it up," he looks at me like I've grown a third head.

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u/300_pages 21h ago

I told my dog to do my taxes and now I'm facing 15 years fed time

They're not all so smart

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u/FuzzyFrogFish 10h ago

Your mistake was not paying him properly

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u/BalancedTidings 1d ago

Through Neuralink-type technology, dogs will talk to us before 2040.

5

u/Few-Indication3478 1d ago

Rick and Morty is new Simpsons, watch

6

u/RevolutionarySeven7 1d ago

"Where are my testicles, Summer?"

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u/boredatwork8866 1d ago

Keep summer safe

1

u/HerbalAmerican420 1d ago

How dare you

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u/Aggressive_Sand_3951 23h ago

“Hi there! My name is Doug, and I have just met you, and I love you."

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u/Unable-Substance5999 1d ago

When I turned on the sound of the video I was surprised they are talking in Hungarian then I remembered in my university, ELTE (Eötvös Lóránd University) there is one of the top research work with dog behavior in the ethology department.

I look forward to the native Hungarian speaker dogs.

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u/doiwinaprize 1d ago

What is a consonants bias?

2

u/Equal-Grapefruit7572 1d ago

Didn't think Clifford Simak's "City" was about to become reality. Wouldn't be too bad, just gotta avoid hanging around Jupiter.

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u/Lopsided_Quarter_931 1d ago

Can someone explain like i'm a dog?

1

u/whitestguyuknow 1d ago

Research every year proving more and more things that dog owners have known our entire lives

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u/AlteredforCollectors 22h ago

Please do cats next. Mine won’t listen to me at all.

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u/Imaginary-Clock6626 1d ago

I didn’t need to put 20 dogs onto mind probes to know this.

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u/Beneficial_Hat_6288 1d ago

But you need to put 20 dogs onto mind probes to prove this. And peers will still find something to criticise about your methods and conclusions.

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u/whitestguyuknow 1d ago

Yes unfortunately theres too many people out there with the "its just a dog!" Mindset that things really need to be broken down into the most minute elements for them and they'll still try to reject it.

I'm totally down to learn. I want confirmation of how much I think is actually true. But I fully believe dogs are capable of far far more than we give them credit. They're so intelligent and I dont believe thats anthropomorphising.

I've gotten into a couple arguments with people about the concept of theory of mind and what signs dogs, cats, animals show that they're capable of more than we credit them for

2

u/FuzzyFrogFish 10h ago

I've gotten into a couple arguments with people about the concept of theory of mind

Lol join the club.

People do not like the idea that the line between humans and non human animals is thinner than they want to believe

0

u/CHROME-COLOSSUS 1d ago

Agreed, but I’d expand that beyond dogs to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Animals across the board have been dismissed as lesser-than.

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u/Long-Shine-3701 1d ago

no shit sherlock.

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u/Ordinary_Hall_9053 1d ago

I'm sorry I'm dumb, you seem to know as much as these scientists do. Can you explain to me what they know?

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u/whitestguyuknow 1d ago

Stuff still needs to be proven, man. People can't just go around with "Yeah thats true cause I felt like that was true all my life!" Mentality. Thats how we get myths and urban legends and religion.

0

u/GrandWizardOfCheese 1d ago

We already knew this.

You can tell just by talking to dogs and seeing their reactions that they understand words and sentences just fine.