Dogs can distinguish languages ​​from each other

– Laura Koya says that dogs are very good in the human environment NBC News.

She is a postdoctoral fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and lead of the new study published in NeuroImage.

Brain scans of 18 dogs show that some areas of the dog’s brain react differently when the dog hears words from a known and an unknown language.

– We discovered that they know more about human language than I expected. This ability to constantly learn about social matters gives them an advantage as a species, says Kwaya.

The idea for studying came to her when she moved from Mexico to Hungary with her dog Con Coon. I only spoke to the dog in Spanish and wondered if he would notice that people in Hungary speak another language, he writes Reuters.

Learn the language

During the experiments, a chapter from the book “The Little Prince” was read, while the dogs’ brains were scanned.

The text and readers were unknown to all 18 dogs, as 16 were accustomed to hearing Hungarian, while two were accustomed to hearing Spanish.

The dogs listened to excerpts from the story in Spanish and Hungarian as well as mixed versions of these excerpts to test whether they could detect both speech and non-speech.

We found that dogs’ brains can detect speech and distinguish language without explicit training, says Koya.

Surprising results

When the researchers compared MRI images of readings in two languages, they found distinct patterns of activity in the dogs. primary auditory cortex in the brain, suggesting they can distinguish between speech and non-speech, Reuters writes.

in their own secondary auditory cortex Analyzing complex sounds, the dogs’ brains produced different activity patterns when they heard a familiar language and an unknown language.

Knowing the difference between languages ​​can be important to dogs as part of their monitoring task. When your dog is on the alert, he’s more likely to be suspicious of people who speak another language, Dr. Catherine Haupt, of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, tells NBC.

The differences were more pronounced in older dogs and dogs with longer snouts.

Kwaya suspects that older dogs stand out because they have more years to listen to an owner’s mother tongue than younger ones, but she wasn’t sure why dogs with longer snouts would perform better.

One possible explanation, Haupt says, is that dogs with longer snouts, which are common among sheep dogs, should be able to understand language better to understand what the shepherd is saying to the dog.

Cuya says the study reflects how much dogs care about the people they belong to.

Our results show that dogs learn from their social environments, even when we don’t learn them directly. So, keep your dog involved in the household, and give him opportunities to continue learning, says Kwaya.