Many animals recognize patterns in human speech. Now it turns out that dogs are particularly good at it. But can they distinguish a language they are familiar with from other sound sequences? A new study in the journal NeuroImage suggests so.
Around four years ago, neuroscientists Laura Cuaya and Raúl Hernández-Pérez moved from Mexico to Hungary with their two border collies. They wondered if their four-legged companions would notice that the people there were speaking in a different language. Language perception in mammals was also the subject of her new research group at Eötvös Lórand University in Budapest.
The team now recruited 18 domestic dogs, including the two border collies from Mexico. The animals previously knew either Hungarian or Spanish, but not both. First, they were trained to lie still in an MRI scanner while it recorded their brain activity. They were then played passages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s »The Little Prince« via headphones – either in Spanish or in Hungarian.
The researchers were able to observe on the brain scans that the same brain regions were active in both cases, but with different patterns – depending on whether the dogs heard the story in their familiar or foreign language. Apparently they noticed differences. But did they actually recognize entire speech patterns or just individual characteristics such as vowels? To find out, Cuaya and Hernández-Pérez played back recordings of gibberish that sounded tinged with Hungarian or Spanish but was unintelligible.