Dogs have the potential to be bilingual, a recent study finds

Researchers suspect dogs can learn up to 165 words. The researchers found that the canines' brains could understand speech from non-speech vocalizations by observing the activity in the primary auditory cortex after having the dogs listen to "natural speech" and "scrambled speech." After establishing dogs have the capacity to detect what they call "speech naturalness," the researchers proceeded to test if the dogs could understand the difference between Spanish and Hungarian. "Language representation in secondary auditory and frontal cortical regions in dogs could reflect their capacity to extract certain auditory regularities which, despite perhaps not being specific to speech, characterize the temporal organization of continuous speech in a given language," the researchers concluded. A "talking" dog offers insights Cuaya told NBC News that the results showed that dogs "know more than I expected about human language."