Dogs are able to tell the difference between normal speech and gibberish and can even distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar languages, according to a new study from Eötvös Loránd University.
Our four-legged friends know how to differentiate between languages
The scientists performed brain scans of 18 dogs while they played, exposing them to phrases in real speech or gibberish derived from Hungarian or Spanish . Two of the dogs involved in the study came from exclusively Spanish-speaking households, while the remaining 16 were from Hungarian-speaking families.
Each dog listened to an excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Spanish and Hungarian. They also listened to scrambled versions of these recordings that made no sense and sounded completely unnatural.
They found that different auditory regions of the dogs’ brains responded when the animals identified a familiar language or gibberish, regardless of the language spoken. The study represents the first time that scientists have shown that a non-human brain is capable of differentiating between two different languages.
“It is possible that brain changes from the tens of thousands of years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better listeners of language, but this is not necessarily the case. Future studies will have to find this out”, explains Attila Andics, leader of the study.
As well as being able to distinguish actual speech from gibberish, the team found that the dogs also seemed to be able to distinguish between Hungarian and Spanish.
Interestingly, the older the dog, the better its brain distinguished between familiar and unfamiliar language. “Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their life with humans, dogs perceive the auditory regularities of the language to which they are exposed”, comments Raúl Hernández-Pérez, co-author of the work.
“It’s exciting, because it reveals that the ability to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human. Still, we don’t know if this ability is a specialty of dogs or general among non-human species,” the authors say.
Referencia: “Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain” by Laura V. Cuaya, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Marianna Boros, Andrea Deme, and Attila Andics, 12 December 2021, NeuroImage 2021.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118811
