You Need To Know Is Your Dog Bilingual

Your dog might seem like a bit of a goof, but research suggests they might be capable of more tricks than you think. A new study from researchers in Hungary published in the journal NeuroImage found that dogs appear to be able to distinguish new and familiar languages.

Not only is that a pretty cool trick for Fido, these findings are the first evidence that a non-human brain can actually differentiate between two languages. The lead scientist behind this study, Dr. Laura Cuaya, previously lived in Mexico, but had moved to Hungary with her pooch,
Kun-kun, to continue her research.

She wanted to know if Kun-kun had any clue that the language around him had changed, or if he was just blissfully unaware and along for the ride. So, to investigate whether dogs’ brains could tell the difference between two different languages, she and her research team recruited Kun-kun and 17 other adorable pups, and used a brain scanner to take a look at activity in different regions of the brain.

After being trained to lie very still in the scanner, each dog was played a clip of a woman reading excerpts from The Little Prince in either Spanish or Hungarian. The dogs were also played scrambled, unintelligible versions of those same clips, to see whether they could detect a difference between natural speech and non-speech at all.

The researchers were then able to use the fMRI data to see which areas of the brain were active during each kind of sound exposure. They found that non-speech clips activated the dogs’ primary auditory cortex differently than the actual languages did. That suggested that the dogs could tell something was a little off about that speech.

It may just be that non-speech sounded unnatural to them. The researchers believe the dogs probably weren’t aware of any higher level qualities of language, like grammar or pacing, that were missing from the scrambled clips. That data also showed that Kun-kun and his buds seemed to be able to tell when they were hearing audio of either familiar or unfamiliar languages.

Their brains showed distinct patterns of activity in the secondary auditory cortexand precruciate gyrus between the Spanish and Hungarian trials.These regions seem to be involved in processing sound in dogs’ brains. Not only that, but the older the dog was, the more distinct the patterns between familiar and unfamiliar languages were.

The authors believe that this is evidence that dogs get better and better at picking up the qualities of specific languages during their time with humans, and know when they’re hearing a language that doesn’t match the qualities they’re used to.

Whether this is a general trait in animals, or something special about dogs that’s related to their domestication, remains to be seen. But the research team hopes that Kun-kun and his new friends in Hungary will be able to help them investigate the evolution of speech perception for many years to come.

Bagikan Artikel ini