“Quien es un buen chico?”
“Aki jó fiú?”
“Who’s a good boy?”
The brain scans of research subjects showed that unique areas of the brain became active when an unknown language was spoken versus when familiar speech was heard.
It’s not particularly surprising news until you learn the 18 subjects were dogs.
“Family dogs are exposed to a continuous flow of human speech throughout their lives,” the scientists wrote. “However, the extent of their abilities in speech perception is unknown. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test speech detection and language representation in the dog brain.”
For the study, the dogs were in an MRI machine and listened to natural speech and scrambled speech (nonsense words) in both a familiar and an unfamiliar language, in this case, Spanish and Hungarian.
Two of the dogs were familiar with Spanish but had never heard Hungarian, and the other 16 had heard Hungarian but not Spanish.
“The interesting thing here is that there was a difference in the (dogs’) brain response to the familiar and the unfamiliar language,” Attila Andics, head of the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, told CNN.
“This is the first nonprimate species for which we could show spontaneous language ability — the first time we could localize it and see where in the brain this combination of two languages takes place,” he said.
Regardless of the language spoken, the dogs showed stronger brain activity in the auditory cortex when hearing nonsense words vs. natural speech.
When distinguishing between the languages, the subjects’ brains lit up in the secondary auditory cortex, which is a more complex region of the brain.
“Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their lives with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language they are exposed to,” co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a postdoctoral fellow in the animal research department at Eötvös Loránd University, said in a statement.
“This is actually pretty similar to what we see with very young preverbal infants who can differentiate between languages spontaneously before they start to speak,” Andics told CNN.
The researchers also found that the older dogs’ brains were better at distinguishing between the familiar and the unfamiliar language.
“In earlier research, we found that not only how we say things, but what we say matters,” Andics told CNN, explaining that dogs could tell the difference between familiar phrases even when they were spoken in the same tone and manner.
“We saw that some words are indeed processed independently of intonation,” he said. “Both how we say it and what we say matters.
“It is actually a very exciting follow-up research question whether the thousands of years of domestication gave dogs some advantage for speech processing,” Andics added.
Participating in the experiment were five golden retrievers, six border collies, two Australian shepherds, one labradoodle, one cocker spaniel and three mixed breeds. All dogs were between 3 and 11 years old, with half being female. The subjects were trained to remain still inside an MRI scanner, and their owners were with them throughout the study. Participants were allowed to leave the MRI scanner and/or the study at any point
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