Wearing headsets, 18 study participants lay quietly while an MRI (fMRI) imaging machine examined their heads.
They listened as a female voice recited a famous phrase from the children’s book “The Little Prince”. “You only look good with the heart; the essential is invisible to the eye,” said the soft voice, first in Spanish, then in Hungarian.
And then the voice began to recite a series of nonsense words.
Two of the 18 participants were familiar with Spanish but had never heard the Hungarian language. The other 16 were used to Hungarian but never knew Spanish. The nonsense words, of course, were unknown to everyone.
It was all part of an experiment designed to see where and how the brain would light up when exposed to familiar and unfamiliar languages, or natural versus random speech.
The result? Brain images showed different patterns of activity in the primary auditory cortex when nonsense words were said compared to when natural speech occurred. They also showed that unique areas of the brain became active when an unknown language was spoken versus when a familiar language was heard.
These results may not be surprising until you realize that the 18 study participants were dogs.
“The interesting fact here is that there was a difference in the response of the (canine) brains to familiar and unfamiliar language,” said Attila Andics, head of the department of ethology (the study of animal behavior) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, in Hungary, who led the experiment.
“This is the first non-primate species that we’ve been able to demonstrate spontaneous linguistic ability – the first time we’ve been able to localize that and see where in the brain this combination of two languages happens,” Andics said.
A movement that crosses continents
The idea started when neuroethologist Laura Cuaya moved from Mexico to Budapest with her dog, Kun-kun, a border collie.
“I had only spoken to Kun-kun in Spanish,” said Cuaya, who is a postdoctoral fellow in animal studies at Eötvös Loránd. “I wondered if it could detect a different language.”
Cuaya and his co-authors developed a study to find out. They gathered five golden retrievers, six border collies, two Australian shepherds, a labradoodle, a cocker spaniel and three dogs of mixed origin, all between 3 and 11 years old and who had already been trained to remain quiet inside an MRI machine. magnetic.
“Kun-kun is happy to participate – you can see a lot of emotion, and he gets a lot of attention,” said Cuaya.
“It’s important to mention that all dogs are free to exit the machine at any time,” she said, adding that the animal handlers were present and that the dogs were “comfortable and happy.”
They found that dogs had much stronger brain activities in the auditory cortex for nonsense words than for natural speech, regardless of the language being spoken.
In the situation of distinguishing two different languages, however, the researchers realized that the brain lit up in an entirely different and more complex region: the secondary auditory cortex.
“Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that, during their lives with humans, dogs perceive auditory regularities in the language they were exposed to,” said co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of animal research at Eötvös Loránd University, in a statement. .
“This is actually very similar to what we see in young, pre-verbal children who can spontaneously differentiate between languages even before they start speaking,” Andics told CNN.
And it seems that practice makes perfect: the older the dog, the better its brain distinguishes between familiar and unfamiliar language.
“In preliminary research, we’ve found that not only how we say things, but what we say matters,” explained Andics, saying that dogs can tell the difference between familiar phrases even when they’re being said in the same tone and manner.
“We’ve seen that some words are processed independently of intonation,” he said. “Both what we say and how we say it matters.”
“It’s actually a very exciting question of study, whether thousands of years of domestication have given dogs any advantage in speech processing.”
This content was originally created in English.
original version
Reference: CNN Brasil
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