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Dogs may understand us more than we think, according to new research.

Scientists found evidence that our canine friends can hear out words and how we say them.

"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," lead researcher Victoria Ratcliffe of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex explained in a journal release.

The point of the latest study was to investigate whether dogs show brain hemispheric biases in response to the information transmitted in human speech. Past research revealed that dogs use their left-brain when processing the vocalization sounds of other dogs.

Researchers exposed dogs to human speech in a way so that sounds entered each of the ears at the same time and with the same amplitude.

"The input from each ear is mainly transmitted to the opposite hemisphere of the brain," Ratcliffe said. "If one hemisphere is more specialized in processing certain information in the sound, then that information is perceived as coming from the opposite ear."

Researchers explained that if the dog turned to its left, it meant that the left ear heard the sound more prominently. This will then suggest that the right hemisphere is more active.

The findings revealed that dogs showed a left-hemisphere processing bias when exposed to familiar spoken commands in which the meaningful components of words were made more obvious. However, they showed significant right-hemisphere bias when the intonation or speaker-related vocal cues were exaggerated.

"This is particularly interesting because our results suggest that the processing of speech components in the dog's brain is divided between the two hemispheres in a way that is actually very similar to the way it is separated in the human brain," co-researcher David Reby said in a news release.

The latest findings suggest that dogs can understand "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say," according to Ratcliffe.

The latest findings are published in the journal Current Biology.