New research finds domesticated dogs can process the meaning of human speech and perceive the emotions behind it.

Dogs are paying attention "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say," according to Victoria Ratcliffe, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sussex and co-author of the study.

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During the experiment, Dr. Ratcliffe and her colleagues brought 250 dogs of all breeds into their lab. Researchers made the dogs listen to human speech from two speakers placed on either side of the animals' heads, LiveScience reported.

Reports said the quality of the played recorded speech was manipulated. One of the clips emphasized the meaning of the words and not the emotions behind those words while another clip had an exaggerated emotional tone.

When the dogs turned their heads to the right as they listened to words without the emotion, it indicated their left hemispheres were processing that speech. By contrast, if the dogs turned their heads to the left while listening to words with intonation and tone, the research suggests the right hemispheres were processing the content.

"This is what you would find in humans. In most people, the verbal information is in the left hemisphere and the speaker information is in the right hemisphere," Ratcliffe explained.

The researchers found dogs use different parts of the brain to determine the characteristics (the familiarity, the gender and emotion) of a speaker's voice and the verbal content of their words.

"Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information and that these components appear to be processed in different areas of the dog's brain,' the scientist added.

The research findings were published in the journal, Current Biology 

Tagsdomesticated dogs, Dogs, dog breeds, animal kingdom, animal study, Dogs Understand Speech Emotion