Dogs can recognize different languages ​​and nonsense words, study finds

(CNN) – Wearing headphones, 18 subjects lay in silence while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine buzzed around their heads, sending out a few words in different languages.

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

“Only with the heart can one see well; the essential is invisible to the eyes,” said the soft voice, first in Spanish, then in Hungarian.

Then the voice began to recite a series of nonsensical words.

Two of the 18 subjects were familiar with Spanish but had never heard the Hungarian language. The other 16 spoke Hungarian well, but had never heard of Spanish. The nonsense words were, of course, gibberish, unknown to any of the subjects.

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

The result? Sure enough, brain scans showed different patterns of activity in the primary auditory cortex when nonsense words were spoken than when natural speech occurred. It also showed that unique areas of the brain were activated when an unfamiliar language was spoken compared to when familiar speech was heard.

Those results may not be surprising, until you realize that all 18 subjects were dogs.

“The interesting thing here is that there was a difference in the response of the brain (of the dogs) to familiar and unfamiliar language,” said Attila Andics, head of the department of ethology (the study of animals) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, who led the experiment.

“This is the first non-primate species for which we were able to show the ability of spontaneous language, the first time we were able to locate it and see where in the brain this combination of two languages ​​occurs,” Andics said.

The study of language in dogs came from a continent move

The idea for the study began when neuroethologist Laura Cuaya moved from Mexico to Budapest with her dog, Kun-kun, a border collie.

“I had only spoken to Kun-kun in Spanish,” said Cuaya, who is a postdoctoral fellow in animal studies at Eötvös Loránd. “I was wondering if it could detect a different language.”

Cuaya and his co-authors designed a study to find out. They collected five golden retrievers, six border collies, two Australian shepherds, a labradoodle, a cocker spaniel and three dogs of mixed descent, all of them between 3 and 11 years old and previously trained to remain immobile inside an MRI scanner.

“Kun-kun is happy to participate, you can see great emotion and he receives a lot of attention,” Cuaya said.

“It is important to mention that all dogs are free to leave the scanner at any time,” he said, adding that the owners were present and that the dogs “are comfortable and happy.”

They found that the dogs had much stronger brain activity in the auditory cortex for nonsense words than for natural speech, regardless of the language being spoken.

Dogs identify language like babies do before they speak

When it came to distinguishing between different languages, however, the researchers found that the brain lit up in an entirely different and more complex brain region: the secondary auditory cortex.

“Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their life with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language to which they are exposed,” said postdoctoral student co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez. member of the animal research department of Eötvös Loránd University, in a statement.

“This is actually quite similar to what we see with very young preverbal babies who can spontaneously differentiate between languages ​​before they start speaking,” Andics told CNN.

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

“In previous research, we found that it doesn’t just matter how we say things, but also what we say,” Andics said, explaining that dogs could distinguish between familiar phrases even when they were pronounced in the same tone and in the same way.

“We saw that some words are processed regardless of intonation,” he said. “Both how we say it and what we say is important.

“It’s actually a very interesting follow-up question whether thousands of years of domestication gave dogs any advantage for speech processing,” Andics added.