Doggone Brilliant! Canines can tell difference between languages

By Mark Waghorn via SWNS

Dogs are 'bilingual' and can distinguish between languages, according to new research.

The skill was thought to be unique to humans but it has also been identified in our four-legged friends.

Their brains reacted differently to narrations - in Spanish or Hungarian.

First author Dr. Laura Cuaya said: "Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary.

"My dog, Kun-kun, came with me. Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish.

"So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian.

"We know people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference. But maybe dogs do not bother.

"After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds.

"We designed a brain imaging study to find this out.

"Kun-kun and 17 other dogs were trained to lay motionless in a brain scanner. We played them speech excerpts of The Little Prince in Spanish and Hungarian.

"All dogs had heard only one of the two languages from their owners.

"So this way we could compare a highly familiar language to a completely unfamiliar one.

"We also played dogs scrambled versions of these excerpts, which sound completely unnatural, to test whether they detect the difference between speech and non-speech at all."

Language-specific neurons were found in an area of the brain called the secondary auditory cortex.

Interestingly, the older the dog was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language.

Co-author Dr. Raul Hernandez-Perez said: "Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities.

"Our findings suggest during their lives with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language they are exposed to.

"This study showed for the first time a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages."

When comparing responses the team at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, also found distinct activity patterns in the dogs' primary auditory cortex.

This is part of the hearing system that helps humans decipher languages.

The variation occurred whether the stimuli originated from the familiar or unfamiliar language.

But there was no evidence dog brains would have a neural preference for speech over non-speech.

Dr. Cuaya said: "Dog brains, like human brains, can distinguish between speech and non-speech."

The mechanism underlying the ability may be different from speech sensitivity in humans.

Dr. Hernandez-Perez explained: "Human brains are specially tuned to speech. Dog brains may simply detect the naturalness of the sound."

Humans have hundreds of different languages spoken all over the world.

Even other primates with good communication skills can't learn other 'dialects' when moved to an unfamiliar location.

Senior author Dr. Attila Andics said: "It is exciting because it reveals the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human.

"Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs' specialty or general among non-human species.

"Indeed, it is possible the brain changes from the tens of thousand years dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners.

"But this is not necessarily the case. Future studies will have to find this out."

Whales, songbirds, bats and dolphins have been found to be able to 'speak' in a certain accent in accordance to where they are from.

Added Dr. Cuaya: "And if you wonder how Kun-kun is doing after moving to Budapest - he lives just as happily as he lived in Mexico City.

"He saw snow for the first time and he loves swimming in the Danube.

"We hope he and his friends will continue to help us uncover the evolution of speech perception."

The study was published in the journal NeuroImage.