Dogs could distinguish different languages ​​| Home & Garden

At least, that’s what researchers who recently did a study on it say.

Mexican Laura V. Cuaya of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who moved to Hungary a few years ago with her dog Kunkun, wanted to know if her animal noticed that he was in a new environment where a different language is spoken.

To investigate, Cuaya and her colleagues played excerpts from the story The Little Prince to Kunkun and 17 other dogs. These were fragments in Spanish and Hungarian. They then analyzed how the dogs’ brains reacted by means of a scan.

All dogs had previously heard only one of two languages ​​(Hungarian or Spanish) from their owners, allowing researchers to compare how the dog’s brain reacted to hearing a known and completely unfamiliar language.

When comparing brain activity, researchers saw different activity patterns in the so-called secondary auditory cortex, the part that processes sounds, of dogs’ brains when they hear a known and unfamiliar language. It also turned out that the older the dogs were, the better their brains discriminated between the two languages.

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