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A study shows that the neuronal activity of these animals changes depending on the language they hear
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This is the first demonstration of its kind that a non-human brain can distinguish between languages.
Anyone who lives with a dog believes (or at least hopes) that their pet understands human language. But in reality, although we all want to believe that these animals understand when we are speaking to them, It is not entirely clear if they understand the words we are saying or if they are guided by other types of factors. To add more fuel to the fire, there are also those who wonder what happens if, suddenly, we start speaking to them in another language. Are the dogs capable of distinguishing between languages and understand that we are addressing them in a language they do not know? It looks like it is. At least according to what a new study published this Thursday in the scientific journal ‘NeuroImage’ and that it is the first demonstration of its kind that a non-human brain can distinguish between languages.
The investigation begins with a curious story. A few years ago, the Mexican researcher Laura V. Cuaya moved from Mexico to Hungary with her dog Kun-kun. “Until then I had only spoken to him in Spanish. So I wondered if Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian, “explains the scientist. To answer this question, Cuaya and his team designed a brain imaging study to analyze how neural activity changes of these animals depending on the language they hear.
The experiment, carried out in the ethology department of the Eötvös Loránd University, recruited a total of 17 dogs. As the researchers explain, these animals were trained to stand still in a brain scan and listen, patiently, to some excerpts from ‘The Little Prince’. Some in Spanish and others in Hungarian. They also added fragments with completely distorted speech. Thus, the researchers were able to compare how the animals reacted to a very familiar language, a completely unfamiliar language and sound that although it seemed articulate, it didn’t actually say anything.
Doggy brain
In neural activity analysis of dogs pointed to several interesting conclusions that shed light on how dogs interpret human language. First, as revealed by the neural activity patterns of the analyzed animals, everything indicates that, indeed, they are able to distinguish speech from other types of sounds. Specifically, the scanners revealed that the region of the dog’s brain responsible for processing this type of stimulus, and differentiating it from others, is the primary auditory cortex. This, for us to understand each other, would demonstrate that these pets understand that our words are not a sound like any other they require different attention.
Second, the study points to a striking conclusion: dogs are capable of distinguishing speech in different languages. “Curiously, the older the dog, the better his brain distinguished between familiar and unfamiliar language“The study points out. According to the scientists, it is in fact the first empirical test that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages. “These findings suggest that during his life with humans, dogs perceive auditory characteristics (and the differences) of each language to which they are exposed “, comments Raúl Hernández Pérez, one of the researchers who has worked on this study.
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According to the researcher Attila Andics, another of the scientists who has led this curious investigation, the conclusions of this work reveal that the ability to learn regarding the regularities of a language is not exclusively human. “Still, we don’t know if this ability is special to dogs or, in general, can be found in other non-human species. In fact, it is possible that brain changes from the tens of thousands of years that dogs have been living with humans have turned them into better listeners of the language“, says the expert.
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