Rats trained to differentiate spoken Japanese and Dutch

By Cory Doctorow at 11:38 pm Sunday, Jan 9

Rats can be trained to differentiate between Dutch and Japanese speech. If this is perfected and the black plague comes back, warring linguistic groups could use this to deploy targeted biowar vectors. I'm sure there are other applications as well, of course. But: Dutch-seeking plague-rats -- w00t!

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 synthesized 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 recognize Dutch did not respond the spoken Japanese.

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

Link (Thanks, Paul!)