If you were to move to a new country with a different language and bring along the family dog, your pet would likely have a hard time understanding commands from the locals, according to a new study looking at how dogs' brains react to different lang
' brains can distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar languages, making them the first-known, and so far only, non-human animals to be able to tell the difference between human languages., was conceived by lead author Laura Cuaya, a neurobiologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, who recently moved from Mexico to Budapest alongside her dog Kun-kun.
The brain scans suggested that not only were the dogs able to clearly distinguish between speech and non-speech, but they also reacted differently to familiar and unfamiliar languages, according to aThe researchers suspect that the the primary auditory cortex and secondary auditory cortex in dogs' brains allow dogs to process speech in two steps, known as"hierarchy processing," Cuaya said.
During the experiments, researchers also found that older dogs showed more activity in the secondary auditory cortex of the brain, suggesting they were better at differentiating familiar and unfamiliar languages than younger dogs."I think that the main reason [that older dogs are better at differentiating languages] is the amount of exposure to the language," Cuaya said."Older dogs have had more opportunities to listen to humans while they talk.
However, what makes dogs unique is that they do not need to be trained to distinguish between human languages.
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