Story at a glance
- Hungarian researchers recently published a study that suggests dogs can tell the difference between human languages and scrambled speech.
- A small group of test dogs were trained to stay still inside of an MRI machine as brain researchers played recordings of a women reading a chapter of the book “The Little Prince” in Hungarian and Spanish.
- More research is needed to support the findings, but results suggest that the ability to learn the regularities of a language is not exclusive to humans.
Just like their human owners, dogs appear to have the ability to tell the difference between languages, according to Hungarian researchers.
Although further studies are needed to fully figure to what extent dogs can differentiate between languages, the study’s findings are exciting since they reveal the ability to learn about the regularities of a language is not a solely human trait.
“Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case. Future studies will have to find this out,” said the study’s senior author Attila Andics.
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Researchers trained 18 dogs to stay still inside an MRI machine and scanned their brains as they listened to recordings of chapter 21 of “The Little Prince,” according to the study published in the scientific journal NeuroImage.
The dogs listened to multiple recordings of the chapter, first in a familiar language — either Hungarian or Spanish — followed by one in an unfamiliar language and then again in scrambled speech, the study explains. Researchers noticed different parts of the dogs’ brains reacted depending on which recording they listened to.
Researchers found distinct activity patterns in the auditory cortex as well as in the secondary auditory cortex.
“And we found a brain region — the secondary auditory cortex, which is a higher level processing region in the auditory hierarchy — which showed a different activity pattern for the familiar language and for the unfamiliar language,” Andics told NPR.
“This activity pattern difference to the two languages suggests that dogs’ brain can differentiate between these two languages. In terms of brain imaging studies, this study is the very first one which showed that a non-human species brain can discriminate between languages.”
Researchers found a greater difference in brain activity in older dogs listening to the two languages in non-scrambled recordings, probably because they have been exposed to human language for more time.
The inspiration for the study came after Laura Cuaya, a brain researcher at the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, first move to the country from Mexico.
“Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary to join the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University for my postdoctoral research. My dog, Kun-kun, came with me. Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish. So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian,” said Cuaya. “We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference. “
“And if you wonder how Kun-kun is doing after moving to Budapest: he lives just as happily as he lived in Mexico City – he saw snow for the first time and he loves swimming in the Danube. We hope that he and his friends will continue to help us uncover the evolution of speech perception,” Cuaya added.
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