Some dogs can learn words as quickly as a 1-year-old child
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2021-10-06 10:01
Dogs that are especially good with words can learn the names of their toys at a speed and scale comparable to a one-year-old human child, according to international research. To test the best, researchers recruited six border collies from across the world who already knew the names of many of their toys. These dogs went through several experiments where their owners were asked to teach them the names of new toys over a week. After the week, the dogs were tested by being asked to fetch their toy from another room. Not only could the dogs memorise the names of 12 new toys with a high rate of success, five could still remember them after a month and four could still remember after two months.
Journal/conference: Royal Society Open Science
Link to research (DOI): 10.1098/rsos.210976
Organisation/s: Loránd University, Hungary
Funder: This study was supported by the National Brain Research Program (grant no. 2017-1.2.1-NKP-2017-00002).
Á.M. received funding from MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group (grant no. MTA01 031).
Media release
From: The Royal Society
Dogs with a vocabulary of object names are rare and are considered uniquely gifted. Some of them presenting skills that are functionally similar to those of infants. We examined the ability of 6 Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs to learn the names of new objects (dog toys) in a short period, and form a long-term memory of the toy names. Most dogs learned 12 new toy names in one week and remembered those for 2 months. We suggest that GWL dogs are a powerful model for studying mental mechanisms related to word acquisition in a nonhuman species.
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