Laura V. Cuaya moved from Mexico to Hungary to do postdoctoral research in neuroethology at Eötvös Loránd University. She took her dog, Kun-kun, with her. She found people would greet Kun-kun on walks and speak to him in Hungarian. Cuaya wondered what Kun-kun thought of that, and whether he could even distinguish that it was an unfamiliar language. The question was right up her research alley, so she designed an experiment around it.
Kun-kun and 17 other dogs were trained to lie still in a brain scanner, in which they were read The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian, followed by a recording of human sounds that aren't speech at all. The results showed a distinct difference in the audio cortex between the recordings of the familiar language and the unfamiliar language. However, there was no significant difference in brain activity between the non-familiar language and the scrambled sounds.
The results were published this week in the journal NeuroImage, and the abstract was also used for a video.
This research is the first to indicate that dogs can distinguish between human languages, and no other non-human animal has shown this ability. You can read more about the research at EurekaAlert. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Raul Hernandez)
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