We might be needing them less after Brexit, but how good would you say your language recognition skills are? Better than average? Better than a tamarin monkey? Or a rat?
It’s not such a strange question to ask when you realise that, according to the winners of 2007’s Ig Nobel Prize for Linguistics, humans, cotton-top tamarins and now rats can all tell languages apart.
Cognitive neuroscientists Drs J M Toro, J B Trobalon and N Sebastian-Galles from the University of Barcelona trained a group of rats to differentiate between Japanese and Dutch by rewarding them with food when they pressed a lever. Provided both languages were spoken either by the same person or same computer-synthesized voice, the rats were able to distinguish between the different rhythmic content of the two languages, with those trained to recognise Japanese only responding to that language and turning a deaf ear to Dutch, and vice versa. Introduce another variable though, like different speakers or backward speech, and the rats were nonplussed.
No surprise to us! Cognitive neuroscience may not be our strong point but we know that employing Technical Analysts who speak the same language as our clients is a lot more productive in R&D tax credit terms than getting an accountant and, say, a biophysicist around the same table.
