If you’ve ever spoken to your dog in more than one language (baby-talk/gibberish included), you’ve probably had the feeling that they knew what you were saying. With new research, now you know they can tell the difference.
Almost four years ago neuroscientists Laura Cuaya and Raúl Hernández-Pérez moved from Mexico to Budapest with their two border collies and one cat. When they realized how different it was to be surrounded by people speaking Hungarian instead of their native Spanish, they wondered if their canine companions had noticed this as well.
Cuaya and Hernández-Pérez work in a research group at Eötvös Lórand University in Hungary that studies the evolution of speech perception in mammals, including dogs, with tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which monitors changes in brain blood flow. More blood flowing to a specific region of the brain means more activation—allowing researchers to glimpse changes in brain activity in response to certain stimuli.
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