Photo: SWNS
Dogs are “bilingual” and can distinguish between languages, according to new research.
The skill was thought to be unique to humans, but it has also been identified in our four-legged friends through a new study.
“Some years ago, I moved from Mexico to Hungary. My dog, Kun-kun, came with me. Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish. So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian,” Dr. Laura Cuaya, the first author of the study, told SWNS about what inspired the canine research.
“We know people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference. But maybe dogs do not bother. After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds. We designed a brain imaging study to find this out,” she added.
For the study, Kun-kun and 17 other dogs were trained to lay motionless in a brain scanner.
“We played them speech excerpts ofThe Little Princein Spanish and Hungarian. All dogs had heard only one of the two languages from their owners. So this way, we could compare a highly familiar language to a completely unfamiliar one,” Dr. Cuaya explained.
“We also played dogs scrambled versions of these excerpts, which sound completely unnatural, to test whether they detect the difference between speech and non-speech at all,” she added.
During the dogs' scans, researchers watched language-specific neurons found in an area of the brain called the secondary auditory cortex. The study found that the older the dog was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language.
SWNS
When comparing responses, the team at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, also found distinct activity patterns in the dogs' primary auditory cortex. This is part of the hearing system that helps humans decipher languages. The variation occurred whether the stimuli originated from the familiar or unfamiliar language.
“Dog brains, like human brains, can distinguish between speech and non-speech,” Dr. Cuaya said.
The mechanism underlying the abilitymay be differentfrom speech sensitivity in humans.
“Human brains are specially tuned to speech. Dog brains may simply detect the naturalness of the sound,” Dr. Hernandez-Perez explained.
Humans have hundreds of different languages spoken all over the world. Even other primates with good communication skills can’t learn other “dialects” when moved to an unfamiliar location.
“It is exciting because it reveals the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human,” the study’s senior author, Dr. Attila Andics, said. “Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs' specialty or general among non-human species.”
“Indeed, it is possible the brain changes from the tens of thousand years 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," he added.
Whales, songbirds, bats, and dolphins have been foundto be able to “speak"in a certain accent in accordance with where they are from.
The study was published in the journalNeuroImage.
source: people.com
