Understanding human language gives dogs "an advantage as a species"
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A new study suggests dogs can understand foreign languages.
The brain scans of 18 dogs appears to suggest that they know when you are speaking your language - a language they are familiar with hearing you speak - and when you are using another.
The research has only been done on a few dogs, so much more work will need to be done before any conclusions are drawn, but this is believed to be the first of its kind to test the idea that a non-human brain can differentiate between languages.
"Dogs are really good in the human environment," said study author Laura Cuaya from Eotvos Lorand University.
"We found that dogs' brains can detect speech and distinguish languages without any explicit training," she added. "I think this reflects how much dogs are tuned to humans."
Who's a clever boy?
The study was conducted with the help of Laura's canine companion, Kun-Kun and 17 pawsome pals.
Cuaya had previously only spoken to Kun-Kun in Spanish and wondered, now she was living in Hungary, if he "noticed that people in Budapest talk a different language," she said.
Kun-kun listens to headphones whilst sitting in an MRI brain scanner
He and his buddies were trained to lie motionless and hooked up to brain scanners and provided with a set of headphones.
Then the dogs were played speech excerpts of a chapter of a story called 'The Little Prince' in both Spanish and Hungarian. The person reading the story was unknown to all the dogs.
Until this point, all of the participating dogs of different breeds, which included border collies, golden retrievers, a labradoodle, cocker spaniel and mixed breeds, had only heard one of the two languages from their owners.
Certainly, this ability to be constant social learners gives them an advantage as a species 鈥 it gives them a better understanding of their environment.
The animals, with ages ranging from 3-11, were also played scrambled, mixed up versions of the excerpts, to examine whether they were able detect the difference between speech and non-speech.
When the scans of the two different versions of the story were compared, researchers found obvious activity patterns in the dogs' brains when they compared responses to the language they were familiar with and the one they were not.
There was no evidence to suggest however that the dogs preferred speech over non-speech.
"The capacity to learn about language is not uniquely human"
鈥淎s many owners already know, dogs are social beings interested in what is happening in their social world鈥
We already know how super-amazing dogs are.
It's clear dogs can recognise non-speech commands and the way in which we say things to - like the tone of our voices - but to respond differently to different languages would be something quite new.
Attila Andics, senior author of the study, added: "This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages.
"It is exciting, because it reveals that the capacity to learn about (the differences between) language is not uniquely human. Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs' specialty, or general among non-human species.
"Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case.
"Future studies will have to find this out."
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