– Dogs are very good in the human environment, says Laura Cuaya NBC News.
She is a postdoctoral fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and the leader of the new study, which is published in NeuroImage.
Brain scans from 18 dogs show that some areas of the dog’s brain react differently when the dog hears words from a known language and an unknown language.
– We found out that they know more about human language than I expected. This ability to constantly learn about the social gives them an advantage as a species, says Cuaya.
She got the idea for the study when she moved from Mexico to Hungary with her dog Kun-kun. She had only spoken to the dog in Spanish and wondered if he would notice that people in Hungary spoke another language, writes Reuters.
– Researcher Laura V. Cuaya with the dog Kun-kun, her eight-year-old Border Collie, 5 January 2022. Photo: REUTERS / Bernadett Szabo / NTB
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Recognized 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, with 16 of them used to hearing Hungarian, while two were used to hearing Spanish.
The dogs listened to excerpts from the story in Spanish and Hungarian and also mixed versions of these excerpts to test whether they could detect speech and non-speech.
– We found that dogs’ brains can detect speech and distinguish language without explicit training, says Cuya.
Surprising findings
When the researchers compared the MRI scans from the readings in two languages, they found distinct activity patterns in dogs. primary auditory cortex in the brain, indicating that they can distinguish between speech and non-speech, Reuters writes.
In their secondary auditory cortex analyzing complex sounds, dogs’ brains produced different activity patterns when they heard a familiar language and an unknown language.
– Knowing the difference between languages can be important for dogs as part of their watchdog task. When the dog is on standby, it is more likely to be suspicious of people who speak another language, says Dr. Katherine Houpt, at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine to NBC.
The differences were more pronounced in older dogs and dogs with longer snouts.
Cuaya suspects that the older dogs stood out because they had had more years to listen to the owner’s mother tongue than the younger ones, but she was unsure why dogs with longer snouts did better.
Houpt says that one possible explanation is that dogs with longer snouts, which are common among sheep dogs, must be able to understand language better to understand what a shepherd says to the dog.
Cuya says the study reflects how attentive dogs are to the people they belong to.
– Our results show that dogs learn from their social environments, even when we do not learn them directly. So just keep involving your dog in the family, and give it opportunities to continue learning, says Cuaya.
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