Read the video transcript here
Kun-kun do you speak spanish?
(Dog barks)
Do you speak hungarian too?
(no reaction)
Scientist Laura Cuaya wondered whether her dog can differentiate between languages after she and her dog Kun-kun moved from Mexico to Hungary.
Before that, Cuaya had only spoken to her border collie in Spanish.
Laura Cuaya / scientist
“I was wondering if my dog noticed that people speak differently here in Hungary. So the idea came to me. I was wondering if dogs feel the same way as me. "
To find out, she and her colleagues trained her (emphasis: her) dog and 17 other dogs to lie quietly in a brain scanner.
In this way, the scientists were able to follow the animals' brain activity while they listened to the speech samples through headphones.
Attila Andics / Head of Research
»We gave the dogs excerpts from the book" The Little Prince "to hear - sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in Spanish. Some of the dogs came from Hungarian speaking families, others from Spanish speaking families. You have never heard any other language before. We checked how the brain reacts to the two different languages and whether there are different brain activities. «
For control purposes, the dogs were also played a reverse version in fragments from both languages that did not sound like a natural language melody.
In this way, the researchers were able to test whether the animals even recognize the difference between language and non-language.
Laura Cuaya / scientist
»Spanish sounds a bit like a song to us humans, it's a very melodic language. Hungarian has a very even language pattern. "
The result of the study: The dogs showed different activity patterns in the secondary auditory cortex, depending on whether they heard a known or an unfamiliar language.
The older the dog, the clearer the differences became.
In addition, the four-legged friends recognize whether the spoken words are actually a language.
Non-linguistic sound fragments are processed in a different brain region.
Attila Andics / Head of Research
"For the first time, we are proving that non-human brains are also able to distinguish and recognize different human languages."
Dogs have lived with humans for thousands of years, so maybe that made them better speech listeners.
It has not yet been clarified whether this ability is a specialty of dogs or whether other animals also have this ability.