A Hungarian study confirms that dogs learn language through complex calculations like human babies. It is the only animal to do this
The dog is said to be man’s best friend but shares other characteristics with us as well. In fact, it seems that it is the only animal to learn language by doing complex calculations as human children do. The discovery comes from a new brain imaging study conducted by Hungarian researchers that would confirm that dogs, like humans, extract words from continuous speech using calculations and brain regions similar to their owners. In fact, children can spot new words in verbal speech long before they learn what those words mean. To tell where one word ends and another begins, children do complex calculations to keep track of the syllable pattern: the syllables that usually appear together are probably words, and those that aren’t probably aren’t.
“To find out what kind of statistics dogs calculate when they listen to a speech, we first measured their electrical brain activity using the EEG,” says Lilla Magyari, the other lead author, a researcher in the same research group, who had placed the methodological basis for performing non-invasive electrophysiology on awake, untrained and cooperating dogs. – Interestingly, we have seen differences in dog brainwaves for frequent versus rare words. But more surprisingly, we also have seen differences in brainwaves for syllables that always occurred together versus syllables that occurred only occasionally, even though the total frequencies were the same. So it turns out that dogs keep track not only of simple statistics (the number of times that a word occurs) but also of complex statistics (the probability that the syllables of a word are found together). This has never been seen in other non-human mammals before, “concludes the researcher.
The new study by researchers from Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary), which combines EEG and fMRI, is the first demonstration of the ability to use complex statistics to know the boundaries of words in a non-human mammal. This work was published in Current Biology.
Dogs learn language like humans: “We didn’t know of other mammals that could do it”
“Keeping track of patterns is not unique to humans – many animals learn from such regularities in the surrounding world, this is called statistical learning. What makes speech special is that its efficient processing requires complex calculations. To learn new words from speech. continuous, it is not enough to count how often certain syllables occur together. It is much more efficient to calculate how likely those syllables occur together – explains Marianna Boros, one of the study’s lead authors and researcher at Eötvös Loránd University’s Neuroethology of Communication Lab – . Until now we didn’t know if other mammals could also use such complex calculations to extract words from speech. We decided to test the brain capacities of family dogs for statistical language learning. “
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