A recent study discovered that dogs not only respond to our tone of voice, but they also respond to the words we're saying, too! As a dog owner you probably already had a hunch this was the case, but this study confirmed a lot of our “theories”, which we found pretty amazing.

Dog owners often claim their pets understand everything they say. Now a new University of Sussex study shows that our canine friends do actually process human speech in a similar way to us.

Mammal communication researchers in the School of Psychology tested more than 250 dogs to see how they responded to a set of spoken commands, and found that, like humans, dogs use different parts of the brain to process the verbal components of a familiar sentence and the emotion or intonation of the speaker.

Individual dogs were simultaneously played a human speech sound through speakers on both the left and the right of them, the significance being that the right ear sends information to the left-hand side of the brain, and vice-versa.

The results showed that when the speech was meaningful for the dogs (such as the command “come on then”), but the voice features such as gender or intonation had been attenuated or removed, the dogs were more likely to turn to the right, therefore showing a left-hemispheric bias.

What words does your pooch respond to the most, and how much does your dog really understand? It's something that will continue to baffle scientists as they continue their research and help us learn more as pet owners like the University of Sussex discussed in their article.

One thing is for certain — dogs are intelligent creatures who are eager to learn and love. As a pet parent, you should feel blessed your pooch understands as much as they do. Maybe over time scientists will uncover even more doggy truths! Stranger things have happened….