Kun Kun has been participating in tests to tell if dogs can distinguish one language from another. Here is Kun Kun taking a break from the MRI machine.
Anyone who has ever been attached to a dog, talking to the dog and studying its reactions, must have wondered what dogs understand and how they understand it. Among the studies that have been done on the question is a recent one about being able to understand different languages.
Alejandra Marquez Janse and Christopher Intagliata present the story at National Public Radio.
“Imagine you’re moving to a new country on the other side of the world. Besides the geographical and cultural changes, you will find a key difference will be the language. But will your pets notice the difference?
“It was a question that nagged at Laura Cuaya, a brain researcher at the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
” ‘When I moved from Mexico to Hungary to start my post-doc research, all was new for me. Obviously, here, people in Budapest speak Hungarian. So you’ve had a different language, completely different for me,’ she said.
“The language was also new to her two dogs: Kun Kun and Odín.
” ‘People are super friendly with their dogs [in Budapest]. And my dogs, they are interested in interacting with people,’ Cuaya said. ‘But I wonder, did they also notice people here … spoke a different language?”
“Cuaya set out to find the answer. She and her colleagues designed an experiment with 18 volunteer dogs — including her two border collies — to see if they could differentiate between two languages. Kun Kun and Odín were used to hearing Spanish; the other dogs Hungarian.
The dogs sat still within an MRI machine, while listening to an excerpt from the story The Little Prince. They heard one version in Spanish, and another in Hungarian. Then the scientists analyzed the dogs’ brain activity.
“Attila Andics leads the lab where the study took place and said researchers were looking for brain regions that showed a different activity pattern for one language versus the other.
” ‘And we found a brain region — the secondary auditory cortex, which is a higher level processing region in the auditory hierarchy — which showed a different activity pattern for the familiar language and for the unfamiliar language,’ Andics said.
“This activity pattern difference to the two languages suggests that dogs’ brain can differentiate between these two languages. In terms of brain imaging studies, this study is the very first one which showed that a non-human species brain can discriminate between languages.
“They also found that older dogs brains’ showed bigger differences in brain activity between the two languages, perhaps because older dogs have more experience listening to human language. Their findings were published this week in the journal NeuroImage.
“Amritha Mallikarjun is a researcher at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia. She wasn’t involved in this study, but has been working on similar research about dogs and language. … While this work relied on brain imaging, Mallikarjun said it would be worth investigating whether dogs could differentiate between languages in behavioral studies, too…. ‘Because often with neural studies, you can find differences that don’t play out in the behavior.’ ” More at NPR, here.
Being curious about the choice of The Little Prince for the text, I went to the original study: “Our linguistic material consisted of a recording of the XXI chapter of The Little Prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry read by two different native, female speakers, with similar timbre, and vocal characteristics [one] in each language. … The text, as well as the speakers were unknown to all dogs and the text was recorded with a lively, engaging intonation.”
So then I looked up the passage, finding it described at a website call Shmoop: “The little prince tells the fox that he is unhappy and asks him to come play with him; but the fox says he cannot because he is not ‘tamed’ (21.8). He explains that ‘to tame’ means ‘to establish ties’ (21.16). Through the process of taming, they will come to need each other, and will become special to one another. The fox requests the little prince to tame him.”
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
How interesting. When our first foster didn’t reply to any commands, I tried them in Spanish. She didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if it was her or my pronunciation.
Now when you you get your foster dogs’ background, be sure to ask what language they “speak”!
Now, I know.
Our dog buddies are smarter than we think. Smarter than some people. 😉
I’m reminded of a couple of my grandchildren. There’s a foreign language they understand, but you just can’t get them to speak it!
Hannah just sent a story that proves the point: “The first year that John and I were together, more or less living together near the university, we adopted a collie/shep mix who was wandering the streets. Actually he adopted us. We had a habit of sitting on the front stoop in the hot summer evenings, with my upstairs neighbors and their white shep. Arthur walked by us again and again, over a couple of evenings, and eventually made his way up the steps and asked to be part of the group.
“He was malnourished, full of worms, all the things one might expect for a dog who had been on his own for quite awhile. We cleaned him up, took him to the vet, etc etc. And walked him every day, down to the dog park near my apartment. We notice that he heeled when on the leash, and sat when we came to a street, but wouldn’t respond to our commands. Curious. We grew to love him and his spirit.
“Over Labor Day we visited friends at the shore, who had other guests, visitors from France. Arthur was immediately taken by these people, sitting leaned up against their chairs. Charmed, they began to talk to him. The next thing we knew, Arthur was offering his paw, lying down, even playing dead. The dog was responding to the French where he had ignored similar directions in English.We had ourselves a French speaking dog! We figured he had been abandoned when his French speaking people left school at the end of their studies.
“Once home, we taught Arthur English. We would say a command in (probably improper) French: Assis-toi! Sit! Viens! Come! And Arthur, being a pretty smart guy, soon learned what English he needed to know to be a well trained dog (we skipped the playing dead part).
“Arthur moved to Kentucky when John did and I never saw him again. He didn’t have a long life—his travails on the street had done permanent damage to his insides. He was the last dog I ever had, and I remember him fondly.”
I love your story. Thanks for sharing
Good to talk to you today and meet the lucky dog you are babysitting!
I have a friend who is Danish and talks Danish to her dogs, but her husband talks English or Australian! And the dogs do understand both languages and follow the commands. They are smart.
Thank you for this evidence! What fun!