Dogs pay attention not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say, shows a study.
"Our results suggest that the processing of speech components in the dog's brain is divided between the two hemispheres in a way that is actually very similar to the way it is separated in the human brain," explained David Reby, reader in psychology at University of Sussex.
The study provides evidence that dogs differentiate and process various components of human speech.
Previous studies showed that dogs have hemispheric biases - left brain versus right - when they process the vocalisation sounds of other dogs.
In the new study, the researchers investigated whether dogs show similar biases in response to the information transmitted in human speech.
The researchers did observe general biases in dogs' responses to particular aspects of human speech.
When presented with familiar spoken commands in which the meaningful components of words were made more obvious, dogs showed a left-hemisphere processing bias, as indicated by turning to the right.
When the intonation or speaker-related vocal cues were exaggerated instead, dogs showed a significant right-hemisphere bias.
The study appeared in the journal Current Biology.
