oddlight

Rats can use the rhythm of human language to tell the difference
between Dutch and Japanese, researchers in Spain reported today.

Their study suggests that animals, especially mammals, evolved some of
the skills underlying the use and development of language long before
language itself ever evolved, the researchers said.

It is the first time an animal other than a human or monkey has been
shown to have this skill.

"These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults,
human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins," the researchers wrote in
their report, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Animal Behaviour Processes, which is published by the American
Psychological Association.

For their study, neuroscientists Juan Toro and colleagues at
Barcelona's Scientific Park tested 64 adult male rats.

They used Dutch and Japanese because these languages were used in
earlier, similar tests, and because they are very different from one
another in use of words, rhythm and structure.

The rats were trained to respond to either Dutch or Japanese using
food as a reward.

Then they were separated into four groups - one that heard each
language spoken by a native, one that heard synthesised speech, one
that heard sentences read in either language by different speakers and
a fourth that heard the languages played backwards.

Rats rewarded for responding to Japanese did not respond to Dutch and
rats trained to recognise Dutch did not respond to spoken Japanese.

The rats could not tell apart Japanese or Dutch played backwards.

"Results showed that rats could discriminate natural sentences when
uttered by a single speaker and not when uttered by different ones,
nor could they distinguish the languages when spoken by different
people," the researchers wrote.

Human newborns had the same problem, although tamarins could easily
tell languages apart even when spoken by different people, the
researchers said.

"It was striking to find that rats can track certain information that
seems to be so important in language development in humans," Toro said
in a statement.

The study showed "which abilities that humans use for language are
shared with other animals, and which are uniquely human. It also
suggests what sort of evolutionary precursors language might have," he
added.



...via smh