Dogs understand human language better than we thought, they distinguish different languages

    Dogs understand human language better than we thought, they distinguish different languages

    A study published in NeuroImage showed that dogs are able to discern between different languages.

    A recent study shows that even the brains of dogs are able to distinguish between different languages. 





    What would happen if our 4-legged friend, who has always been used to listening to our language, finds himself in a situation with people who speak another language? This is the question posed by researcher Laura V. Cuaya, who studied the ability of dogs to understand languages. An unusual question, born from an episode in the life of the scholar: 

    I moved from Hungary from Mexico a couple of years ago to start my postdoctoral work in the neuroethology research group of the ethology department of Eötvös Loránd University. My dog, Kun-kun, came with me. Until then he had only heard Spanish. We know that humans can distinguish languages ​​from an early age, but can dogs do that?

    Thus was born the study “Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain”, published on NeuroImage by a team from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. 

    A group of researchers studied the brain responses of 18 dogs: 16 who had lived in contexts where only Hungarian was spoken and 2 were born and raised in Spanish-speaking families. The animals were made to listen to recordings from "The Little Prince" in both languages. Meaningless sounds were also produced by cutting and mixing sentences to see if the dogs recognized the difference between speaking and not speaking at all.

    According to the results, obtained thanks to brain imaging, the dog's brain is activated when it hears human language and shows different patterns when it hears a known and an unknown language. Not only that: according to the study, the dog's brain, like humans, is able to separate speech from non-speech.

    However, the mechanism for perceiving the similarity of speech differs from that of humans: while the human brain pays particular attention to language, the brain of dogs presumably simply perceives the naturalness of sound stimuli.



    Attila Andics, a capo del MTA-ELTE Momentum Neuroethology Research Group, if you comment:

    We have seen that some words are actually processed regardless of intonation. Be it how we say it, what we say is important. However, we still don't know if only dogs can do this or other species as well. Have brain changes that occurred over tens of thousands of years of closeness to humans helped today's dogs hear language with smarter ears? More experiments are needed to answer.

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