Thousands of years of domestication have left dogs with a remarkable capacity to comprehend human speech, and new research reveals that the brains of our four-legged friends are even able to differentiate between languages. Appearing in the journal Neurolmage, the new study is the first to detect such an ability in any non-human animal.
To conduct their research, the study authors trained 18 pet dogs to lie motionless inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)scanner so that their brain activity could be recorded while they listened to audio recordings of human speech. Two of the dogs involved in the study came from homes that spoke Spanish, while the remaining 16 belonged to Hungarian-speaking families.
While in the scanner, each dog listened to an excerpt（节选）from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian. They also heard scrambled（杂乱的）versions of these recordings that made no sense and sounded completely unnatural.
When examining the responses of the dogs' brains to these recordings, the researchers noted that activity patterns within the animals＇ primary auditory cortex（听觉皮层）differed depending on whether they heard actual speech or scrambled nonsense. This suggests that dogs are indeed able to tell the difference between speech and non-speech, regardless of the language spoken.
The researchers also found that this response to language was more pronounced in older dogs, leading them to conclude that longer exposure to human speech enables pet dogs to improve their language recognition skills.
In a statement, study author Attila Andic explained these findings indicate that "the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human. "However, it remains to be seen "whether this capacity is dogs' specialty, or general among non-human species. "
"Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousands of years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case. "
