At least, that’s what researchers who conducted a study on this topic recently say.
Mexican Laura Fe Koya of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who moved to Hungary a few years ago with her dog Concón, wanted to know if her animal had noticed that he was in a new environment where a different language is spoken.
To investigate, Kwaya and her colleagues played excerpts from the story of the Little Prince of Concón and 17 other dogs. These were fragments in Spanish and Hungarian. Then they analyzed how the dogs’ brains reacted via the scan.
All dogs had previously heard only one of two languages (Hungarian or Spanish) from their owners, allowing the researchers to compare how the dog’s brain responded to hearing a well-known and completely unfamiliar language.
When comparing brain activity, the researchers saw different activity patterns in the so-called secondary auditory cortex, the part that processes sounds, in the dogs’ brains when they heard known and unfamiliar language. It also turns out that the older dogs get, the better their brains can distinguish between the two languages.
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