vxx@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I found a study that suggests you’re corect and dogs can differentiate between words and syllabis. More on the level of an infant though.
This study provides the first electrophysiological evidence, to our knowledge, for word processing in dogs, revealing its temporal dynamics. Dogs’ ERP responses did not differentiate instruction words (WORDS) and phonetically similar nonsense words (SIMILAR), but ERP for both WORDS and SIMILAR was different from ERP for phonetically dissimilar nonsense words (NONSENSE). This suggests that dogs process instruction words differently from dissimilar nonsense words.
Dogs listened to commands (sit and come) and their modified versions in which phonemes were changed. Dogs noted the difference in alternation of both the first consonants (e.g. [tʃɪt] instead of sit) and the vowels (e.g. [sæt] instead of sit), as shown by the decline of responses to the alternated commands. Based on research on human infants, we have also no reason to assume that the vowel manipulation we applied here (swapping [i], [ɒ] and [ɛ] across conditions in the first vowel position) would be perceptually less salient than the consonant manipulation applied by Mills et al.