Beasts of science: your dog will never speak… like a Spanish cow!

Our best friend the dog has already been mentioned several times in this Beasts of Science column. We discovered him capable of sharing our emotions. The happiest. Like the saddest. Or to put the paw on our small faults. In uncovering our lies for example. More recently, we got to know Max, Gaia or even Squall. Of real little geniuses who had learned to distinguish objects by name.

And a few days ago, I came across new work – still carried out by the famous team ofethologists from Eötvös Lorànd University from Budapest (Hungary) – which caught my dog ​​lover’s attention. Our best friend, the researchers said, is able to differentiate languages. Incredible, do you think? You are quite right. Because it seems that very few animals are capable of such a feat. It has already been proven in African elephants. But it is known. Elephants are especially intelligent. And today is the very first time that this ability has been proven on a brain non-human.

First, you might like to know how the hell the researchers thought about testing this on dogs. Chance, once again. An ethologist who moves from Mexico to Hungary with her dog. And who, at the bend of a plane, wonders how her faithful Kun-kun will react to all these people who will not speak the same language as her. Human babies make a difference. But the dogs?

Spanish has nothing to do with Hungarian!

So researchers at Eötvös Lorànd University in Budapest (Hungary), as they are used to now, trained dogs to stand still in a scanner. There, they showed them extracts … from the Little Prince. Nice choice! In Spanish and Hungarian. Dogs who had never heard more than one or the other of these languages. And while they are, the researchers also tested the ability of these dogs to distinguish the real text from a garbled and meaningless version.

The images are unmistakable. Separate activity models appear in the cortex primary auditory hearing of dogs when they hear coherent text or text … without a tail or a head. This ability could be linked to some sort of detector hidden in the brains of the character’s dogs, researchers say. “Natural” or not of a sentence.

It is in the secondary auditory cortex that language-specific activity patterns have been found. A little more marked patterns in older dogs. These models would be the sign that by our side, dogs can learn the auditory regularities of our language. Then to distinguish it from a foreign language. Perhaps the result of the evolution of dog brain for millennia he has frequented men. Or not … Anyway, it would seem that once again, we are led to conclude that our friend the dog is not so stupid!

Not so stupid and sensitive. So for those who are interested in how Kun-kun was able to adapt to these people who speak a language he does not understand, rest assured! The love of his human is more than enough for him. And now that he has discovered what snow is, he may well help our ethologist friends at Eötvös Lorànd University to learn a little more about the way dogs perceive speech …