Research by the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC), a research team of the Barcelona Science Park which studied the ability of rats to distinguish between different languages, has won one of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes. The article by Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Joan Manuel Toro and Josep Batista Trobalón was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, and the 17th Ig Nobel Prizes awards ceremony was held on 4 October at the University of Harvard, Sanders Theater (USA).

As the authors explain, previous studies had shown that human babies and some species of monkey were able to detect differences in rhythm and intonation between Japanese and Dutch. These two aspects, rhythm and intonation, are known as prosodic markers and are important in language acquisition as they indicate certain syntactic features and enable a distinction to be made between phrases from two different languages. However, when these same phrases are presented backwards, some of these prosodic features are lost and discrimination becomes impossible.

What the GRNC wished to study was whether the rat, an animal that is much more distant from humans and which does not use complex utterances to communicate, could also detect rhythmic differences in speech. To test this they first taught rats to press a lever in order to receive food. The rats were then divided into two experimental groups and presented with a phrase in Dutch followed by a two-minute pause, and then another phrase in Japanese followed by a two-minute pause; this schedule was repeated over a period of forty minutes. Half of the rats only obtained food if they pressed the lever after hearing the phrase in Dutch, while the other half received food upon pressing the lever after hearing the phrase in Japanese.

The results showed that rats could learn to discriminate between the two languages, but when the experiment was repeated with the phrases presented backwards, they were unable to detect any differences, just as occurs with human babies and monkeys. Therefore, the researchers concluded that a mechanism used by humans in language acquisition is shared by other non-primate mammals, and thus it is not exclusively human.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded each year by the Annals of Improbable Research, a journal based in Cambridge (Massachusetts), and are eagerly reported by the media. Their editorial board consists of eminent scientists, some of whom have won a genuine Nobel Prize and who now take part in the Ig Nobels awards ceremony.

According to the organizers, the Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think”, and are intended to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology” . The prizes are awarded in different categories and the ceremony is sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association.