DOG owners often claim their pets understand what they are saying.

While some scoff at the idea, scientists at Sussex University think they might be right.

Research published this week suggests dogs process language in a similar way to humans.

If you want to know if your dog understands what you say, watch which way it is looking.

Experts Victoria Ratcliffe and Dr David Reby carried out tests on more than 250 Brighton dogs, including Stanmer Park regulars and RSPCA centre dogs.

Each dog was given familiar commands such as “come on then” and others were given incomprehensible noises and orders in strange languages.

The aim was to discover how the words and the way they were spoken were processed on different sides of the canine brain.

They found dogs processed the content of a sound in the left side of the brain, while they processed the characteristics of the voice and its emotional content in the right.

If a dog turned its left ear to the voice it meant the right side of the brain was processing the sound and vice versa.

Thus if your dog turns right after a command, it understands the content of what you say.

If the dog is picking up incomprehensible speech then it will turn to the left.

Miss Ratcliffe said: “Humans mainly use the left hemisphere of their brain to process the verbal content of speech and the right hemisphere to process the characteristics of the voice and its emotional content.”

She said previous studies have shown that other mammals have hemispheric biases when processing sounds but no one knew how domestic animals responded to human speech.

The pair do not think dogs can understand human speech, but their perception of it parallels that of humans.

Miss Ratcliffe added: “Our study does suggest that dogs pay attention to this information in human speech.”

The findings of the study have been produced in the journal Current Biology.