If you were to bring your dog with you to a new country with a different language, it would be hard for the dog to understand commands from the locals, according to a new study.
Dogs' brains can tell the difference between familiar and unfamiliar languages, making them the first non-human animals to be able to do that.
Laura Cuaya, a professor of neuroscience at Etvs Lornd University in Hungary, was the lead author of the new study.
Cuaya told Live Science that the people in Hungary were very friendly with dogs and often approached Kun-kun and talked to him. I wondered if Kun-kun noticed that people in Hungary speak a different language.
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Cuaya and her team trained 18 dogs, including Kun-kun, to lie motionless in an MRI machine so they could be scanned. The researchers played a Spanish reading from the famous children's book "The Little Prince", a Hungarian reading from the same book, and a series of human noises that didn't look like speech at all, as the dogs were being scanned.
One of the dogs was familiar with one of the languages, the other was not, meaning they had only been exposed to one of the languages.
The brain scans suggested that the dogs were able to distinguish between speech and non-speech, but they also reacted differently to familiar and unfamiliar languages.
Two dogs are next to a machine. Eniko Kubinyi is a person.
The researchers believe that the primary and secondary auditory cortex in dogs' brains allow them to process speech in two steps.
She said that the primary auditory cortex can detect speech or not. The secondary auditory cortex differentiates between a familiar and unfamiliar language.
Researchers found that older dogs had more activity in the secondary auditory cortex of the brain than younger dogs, suggesting that they were better at differentiating familiar and unfamiliar languages.
Cuaya said that the amount of exposure to the language is the main reason older dogs are better at differentiating languages. Older dogs have more time to listen to humans.
The researchers think dogs are not the only animals capable of telling the difference.
Cuaya said that the brain is good at picking up patterns and that each language has a series of sounds and patterns that make them different from each other. Many animals should be able to recognize these patterns after some training.
Dogs don't need to be trained to distinguish between human languages.
The domestication process may have caused the difference to be detected by the brains. Dogs are interested in hearing us and are one of the few species that can do that.
Dogs can tell when people are lying to them, according to previous research.
Cuaya was surprised by the study's findings, but she also thinks that many people underestimate how datememe datememe datememe datememe can be.
Cuaya said that his experience with dogs has shown him that they pay attention to their social world and everything that happens around them. I think dogs know more about us than we think.
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The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
