Do dogs understand languages? Hungarian research has the answer

Again and again, some people ask the seemingly abstract question: do dogs understand what we tell them, or do they focus on different tones? The question is not that abstract anymore, as the Ethology Department of Eötvös Loránd University has found the answer.

In their latest brain imaging study, researchers at the university found that dogs’ brains sense when they hear human speech and show different patterns when hearing a known and an unknown language. According to the research results, this is the first time in the world that a non-human brain has been shown to be able to distinguish between two languages.

To find out whether dogs can differentiate between languages, 18 dogs were involved in the research. All the dogs were trained to lie still in the MRI, while the examinations were going on. The dogs heard only one language from their owners. Some dogs heard Hungarian.

The researchers played excerpts from The Little Prince in Hungarian and in Spanish to compare the dogs’ brain responses to the language they knew and the language that they were not familiar with.

read also: The rarest Hungarian dog breed you never heard of is almost extinct – PHOTO GALLERY

“Unnatural stimuli were produced by cutting the pieces of text into very short slices and mixing them. We used these stimuli to see if dogs recognise the difference between speech and non-speech at all,” the university’s website describes the research method.

Another important result of the research was that the brains of the dogs were able to distinguish between Hungarian and Spanish. One of the findings was that the pattern of dogs’ brain responses to speech and non-speech differed. There is no evidence, however, that dog brains would favour speech over non-speech. What this result means is that dogs can differentiate between speech and non-speech. There is a piece of very important information as well. As they write in the referred article, “the mechanism for perceiving speech-likeness may be different than for humans: while the human brain pays special attention to speech, the brain of dogs presumably simply senses the naturalness of the sound stimulus.”

So, based on the research, dogs can distinguish between human languages. This relates to a story featured in the media in 2021 where a dog was discovered to only know Spanish.

Max, the 4-year-old rescue Chihuahua, was clearly well-behaved, and the owner saw that he might have had some training before. However, the dog did not listen to the commands. Later, it turned out that the dog only knows Spanish. The dog stared at the owner when she said “come” but walked up to her when she said “acquí”. Max also dismissed “sit” but sat down at the Spanish word “siéntate”. You can see the cute dog on TikTok.

Below, you can watch a video about the research:

Read alsoA Hungarian shepherd to become TikTok’s new superstar? – VIDEO!

Source: Yahoo, etologia.elte.hu