Thursday, January 6, 2022

Creation Moment 1/7/2022 - Dog Brains & Language

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,...
Genesis 1:24
 
Are you surprised?
Dogs can seem to tell our different languages but
have no neural preference.
 
 "Dog brains can detect speech, and show different activity patterns to a familiar and an unfamiliar language, a new brain imaging study by researchers from the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary) finds. This is the first demonstration that a non-human brain can differentiate two languages

When comparing brain responses to speech and non-speech, researchers found distinct activity patterns in dogs’ primary auditory cortex. This distinction was there independently from whether the stimuli originated from the familiar or the unfamiliar language. There was, however, no evidence that dog brains would have a neural preference for speech over non-speech.
 
But the mechanism underlying this speech detection ability may be different from speech sensitivity in humans: whereas human brains are specially tuned to speech, dog brains may simply detect the naturalness of the sound.
 
These language-specific activity patterns were found in another brain region, the secondary auditory cortex. Interestingly, the older the dog was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language. “Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their lives with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language they are exposed to,” says Hernández-Pérez." SciNews