Scientists from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary studied how dogs process human speech: they can
The authors used a specializeda magnetic resonance imaging scanner and a conventional electroencephalograph to study the brain activity of animals. As a result, it turned out that dogs quickly learn to recognize unfamiliar words, including fragments of them, and also know how to distinguish between rare and often used combinations of sounds.
According to the researchers, this is the first time in the history of science that an animal has been found to have the ability to learn statistically.
.Tracking patterns is not typicalonly for people. Many animals learn from patterns in the world around them, this is called statistical learning. What makes speech special is that processing it requires complex calculations. To learn new words from continuous speech, it is not enough to count how often certain syllables appear together. It is much more difficult to understand when these syllables occur together. This is how children segment words
Marianna Boros, author of the article and ethologist
The authors conducted an MRI of the dogs' brains and found that inThe process of speech perception involves universal areas of gray matter, as well as specialized parts of the brain. The human brain works in a similar way.
According to the authors, this feature can be explained — dogs are the earliest domesticated animal species and people have been interacting with them for several millennia.
As a result, the researchers concluded that some of the computational and neural processes that are triggered during language learning are not unique to humans - they are used by other animals as well.
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