Dogs know when you’re speaking a different language — and talking nonsense | Astronomy

On Jan 10, 2022

While working from home and spending more time with our pets, perhaps we’ve reached a form of understanding that crosses the linguistic barrier.

There are times when you just know your pet is trying to say something. When neuroethologist Laura Cuaya moved from Mexico to Hungary with her border collie, Kun-kun, she was driven to discover whether he could detect the language difference.

The result: Cuaya’s study of 18 dogs, monitored inside fMRIs, demonstrated that the canine brain indeed recognized these changes.

They listened as a female voice recited a famous line from the children’s book, “The Little Prince.”

“It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,” the soft voice said, first in Spanish, then in Hungarian. Then the voice began to recite a series of nonsense words.

Two of the 18 subjects were familiar with Spanish but had never heard the language of Hungary. The other 16 were well-versed in Hungarian, but had never heard Spanish. Nonsense words were, of course, unfamiliar to any of the subjects.

It was all an experiment designed to see where and how the brain would light up when exposed to familiar versus unfamiliar languages, or natural speech versus scrambled speech.

Sure enough, the brain scans showed different activity patterns in the primary auditory cortex when nonsense words were spoken than when natural speech occurred. It also showed unique areas of the brain became active when an unknown language was spoken versus when familiar speech was heard.

That makes dogs the first non-primates shown to possess spontaneous language ability.

“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,” said Attila Andics, head of the department of ethology (the study of animals) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, who lead the experiment.

And practice makes perfect, it seems. The older the dog, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language.

The-CNN-Wire