Everybody knows that dogs can learn to associate specific spoken words with objects that look a certain way. A groundbreaking new study, however, shows that some gifted dogs can also match given spoken words to dissimilar-looking objects that perform certain functions.
It's certainly possible to train a dog to fetch a specific toy when it hears that toy's name being spoken.
In most cases, the dog is simply fetching the toy whose appearance it has been trained to associate with the sound of the name. That said, such is not the case with a select group of seven Gifted Word Learner dogs studied by scientists from Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University.
The household pet animals – consisting of six border collies and one blue heeler – are all capable of a skill known as "label extension."
Previously only seen in a few non-human animals that were trained over a period of years in captivity, label extension involves the concept of extending labels to objects that share the same function, rather than just the same appearance. Human toddlers do it instinctively … and so, apparently, do Gifted Word Learner dogs.
For the study, the seven dogs learned two verbal labels, "Pull" and "Fetch," during daily at-home play sessions with their owners. These labels were applied to the various types of toys they played with, based on how the toys were used. If a toy was tugged, it was considered a Pull type, and if it was retrieved when thrown, it was considered a Fetch type.
The dogs showed that they knew these words, by bringing one of the appropriate type of toy from the pile when its name – Pull or Fetch – was spoken.
Next, some new toys were added to the collection. They were played with by being tugged or retrieved, but importantly the "Pull" and "Fetch" labels were not spoken during the play sessions. Nonetheless, when the dogs were later asked to bring a Pull or Fetch toy from the pile, they chose the appropriate new toys more often than chance alone would dictate.
"We discovered that these Gifted Word Learner dogs can extend labels to items that have the same function or that are used in the same way," says the lead scientist, Dr. Claudia Fugazza. "It’s like a person calling both a traditional hammer and a rock by the same name. The rock and the hammer look physically different, but they can be used for the same function."
A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Current Biology.
Sources: Eötvös Loránd University, Cell Press via EurekAlert
