As pets, dogs are exposed to a lot of human language throughout their lifetime. Yet, little is still known about how their brains perceive and analyze this linguistic auditory information. Are they able to tell the difference between a language and a “non-language”? And between two different languages?

This is what a team of researchers from Lorand-Iotvos University (Hungary) tried to establish. Laura V. Kuya, lead author of the study on the topic published in the journal neuroimagesaid in a press release that he had asked himself this question for the first time while traveling from Mexico to Hungary. Her border collie, Kun-kun, to whom she always spoke in Spanish, was moving in with her: “I wondered if Kun-kun saw that people in Budapest speak a different language, Hungarian”, she remembers.

“We know that humans, even preterm children” (Editor’s note before they develop a strictly speaking language) make the difference ” between different languages ​​when they hear them. “But maybe the dogs don’t care”, Laura Kuya says Together with his team from the Department of Ethology, they conducted a brain imaging study (absolutely non-invasive and safe for tested animals) to answer these questions of language representation in the canine brain.

As pets, dogs are exposed to a lot of human language throughout their lifetime. Yet, little is still known about how their brains perceive and analyze this linguistic auditory information. Are they able to tell the difference between a language and a “non-language”? And between two different languages?

This is what a team of researchers from Lorand-Iotvos University (Hungary) tried to establish. Laura V. Kuya, lead author of the study on the topic published in the journal neuroimagesaid in a press release that he had asked himself this question for the first time while traveling from Mexico to Hungary. Her border collie, Kun-kun, to whom she always spoke in Spanish, was moving in with her: “I wondered if Kun-kun saw that people in Budapest speak a different language, Hungarian”, she remembers.

“We know that humans, even preterm children” (Editor’s note before they develop a strictly speaking language) make the difference ” between different languages ​​when they hear them. “But maybe the dogs don’t care”, Laura Kuya says Together with his team from the Department of Ethology, they conducted a brain imaging study (absolutely non-invasive and safe for tested animals) to answer these questions of language representation in the canine brain.

a little talk on language

All spoken languages ​​are characterized by regular acoustic elements such as prosodic features (such as rhythm, intonation, pronunciation, pronunciation…) that control the way spoken sounds are distributed, among other things. Humans learn these features long before asking questions about syntax or semantics: the temporal cortex plays a central role in this learning. To tell the difference between the two languages, it is important to recognize these characteristic elements!

language and non-language

The researchers first assessed whether the dogs were able to differentiate between sentences spoken in the existing language (in this case, Spanish and Hungarian) and “scrambled” sound clips, where to suppress acoustic regularities specific to the language. Speech was distorted. Question.

By observing their brain activity on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), when they listened to these sound clips, the researchers found that the dogs’ auditory cortex separates and processes language and “non-language” differently, Just like the same happens in humans.

One of the dogs participating in the study is brain scan (fMRI) from Lorand-Eotvos University (Hungary). credit: Eniko Kubinic

Different brain activity for different languages

To what extent dogs differentiate between languages ​​they are familiar with and those they are unfamiliar with, the researchers read passages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince in Spanish and Hungarian. , The dogs participating in the study knew only one of their owner’s two languages, and were completely unfamiliar with the other.

The fMRI results revealed a different brain activity for each language, particularly in the secondary auditory cortex, which essentially groups together the auditory associative regions in charge of the more complex operations of processing received information.

This is the first time that this ability for linguistic distinction has been observed in the brain (and not behaviorally) in an animal other than humans. According to Attila Andics, a neuroscientist at Hungarian University and co-author of the study, “It is possible that in the thousands of years dogs have spent living with humans, their brains have undergone changes that make them more reactive and responsive, but this is not necessarily the case: other studies will have to explore these avenues.”

Two dogs participating in the study, at Loránd-Eötvös University (Hungary), wait their turn next to a brain scan (fMRI). credit: Eniko Kubinic

a matter of habit

According to Ral Hernández-Pérez, also a co-author of the study, their results “suggest that over the course of their lives with humans, dogs pick up auditory regularities specific to the language to which they are exposed”, He and his colleagues have specifically observed that the difference in brain activity between known and unknown languages ​​is even greater as dogs get older: for researchers, this testifies to a certain habit of dogs to that language. in which he has learned. Faced many and often.