A study published by the University of Sussex, 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.

Doctoral candidate Victoria Ratcliffe and Dr David Reby, whose study is published was published in Current Biology, stress, however, that their research does not suggest dogs could understand the full complexity of human speech, only that their perception of speech parallels that of humans.

“Although we cannot say to what extent they understand the complexity of the verbal content, our study does suggest that dogs pay attention to this information in human speech and that they perceive its content in a way that broadly parallels human perception,” says Ratcliffe.

Does this change your perception on how your dog understands you?