Summary:
- Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University utilized EEG technology to demonstrate that dogs can distinguish between speech sounds, specifically differentiating between familiar words and nonsense words that differ by only a single phoneme.
- The study reveals that dogs process speech in a hierarchical manner similar to humans, identifying consonant-like sounds before integrating them into a full word, suggesting that the neural capacity for speech perception may be more ancient and widespread in mammals than previously thought.