Rats can discriminate between human languages
A group of neuroscientists in Spain conducted a research on whether rats can distinguish between human languages. Apparently, they can:
In summary, rats’ abilities to extract prosodic cues from sen-tences of two different languages are greater than previously thought, for they can generalize those features to new sentences, while maintaining on the recurrent pattern of not being able to use any cue when sentences are played backward. When faced with the problem of different speakers, rats also have more difficulty in effectively discriminating among sentences. This difficulty is found as well in human infants, but eventually, they overcome it in order to acquire lexical and syntactic aspects of the language, and combine them with phonotactic, segmental, and semantic information. This process will allow human infants to acquire the rich and comprehensible communication system that only humans possess. Even though much more research is required to understand the extent to which other animals are also capable of such an effective combination, and while acknowledging that the similarity in results does not guarantee identity in the underlying processes, the rats’ failure to discriminate backward speech, and the costs of the normalization process, suggest the possibility that these effects might reflect general auditory constraints that shape aspects of language acquisition.