A study conducted by a team of scientists has found that dogs are able to process speech in a manner similar to that of humans and can understand both words and the way in which they are said, The Guardian reported on Tuesday. An article published by the scientists from Hungary in a journal called Science called the results of the test “very exciting and surprising”, according to the report.

The team, led by Attila Andics, said that they trained 13 dogs to lie motionless inside a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine for the purpose of scanning their brains. They then used the scans to observe how the dogs’ brain activity changed when recorded phrases were played back to them, with phrases and their intonations being divided into two categories to differentiate between positive messages and neutral ones.

The results showed that the canines processed words with the left hemisphere of their brain and the intonation of the words with a region in the right hemisphere. Andics said the dogs utilised the “very same part of the brain” used by humans to “respond to the emotional content of a sound”.

However, the lead researcher added that dogs also use other cues such as body language and facial expression to process the emotional content of a message. The team wrote that the results showed new insights into the evolution of language, with Andics saying that the “neural mechanism” used to process the meaning of words is “not uniquely human”. “They seem to be there in other species,” he said.