Do dogs understand languages? Hungarian research has the answer
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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.
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“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.