A case of left-right confusion misled researchers about how dogs process language.

Last August, Hungarian neuroscientists Atilla Andics and colleagues reported that the left hemisphere of the dog brain is selectively activated in response to the lexical properties (i.e. the meaning) of spoken words. This result was very interesting, not least because lexical processing is also lateralized to the left hemisphere in most humans. The paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science.

However,