Hungarian Researcher Reveals Dogs Can Distinguish Human Language

Illustration of a dog with a human. (Pexels/Nataliya Vaitkevich)

JAKARTA - Dogs can distinguish between languages, researchers in Hungary found, after playing excerpts from the story 'The Little Prince' in Spanish and Hungarian to a group of 18 dogs and examining how their brains reacted.

The research was led by Laura V. Cuaya of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who moved to the city from Mexico several years ago, taking her dog Kun-kun with her.

"I wonder if Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest speak a different language, Hungarian," he said, citing Reuters January 6.

"(In the study) we found for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish (between) languages."

In their lives with humans, dogs pick up on auditory patterns from the language they encounter, said Raul Hernandez-Perez, a co-author of the study.

During the experiment, Kun-kun and the others were trained to lie motionless in a brain scanner for several minutes.

All the dogs had only heard one of the two languages, either Hungarian or Spanish, from their previous owners, allowing researchers to compare how their brains reacted to very familiar and completely foreign languages.

The dogs listened to excerpts from stories in Spanish and Hungarian as well as randomized versions of these quotes, to test whether they could detect speech and non-speech.

When comparing brain responses, the researchers found distinct patterns of activity in the dogs' brain's main auditory cortex, suggesting the dogs could differentiate between speech and non-speech.

To note, in their secondary auditory cortex which analyzes complex sounds, dogs' brains produce different patterns of activity when they hear known and unfamiliar language. The older dogs get, the better their brains can distinguish between the two languages.