Hungarian top university’s research breakthrough in ethology
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Dogs are able to distinguish between different languages, according to a fresh brain imaging study conducted by ethologists at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).
The study by ELTE’s Department of Ethology, published in scientific journal NeuroImage, is the first of its kind to demonstrate than a nonhuman brain can differentiate between two different languages. “We know that people, even pre-verbal human infants, notice the difference [between different languages],” a statement on the department’s website quoted Laura V. Cuaya, first author of the study, as saying.
The brain imaging study was carried out on Cuaya’s own dog, Kun-kun, and 17 others.
The dogs had to be trained to lie motionless in a brain scanner where they were played speech excerpts of The Little Prince in Spanish and Hungarian. All of the dogs had only heard one of the two languages from their owners, allowing the authors of the study to compare the dogs’ reactions to a highly familiar language and a completely unfamiliar one.
The study found that the dogs were able to distinguish between Spanish and Hungarian. These language-specific activity patterns were found in the secondary auditory cortex. The older the dog was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language.