Most dogs don’t learn words unless they are extensively trained – but a team of researchers has found that some excellent pets have “exceptional skills.”
Researchers from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, observed two “gifted” dogs: a Border Collie named Whiskey, and a Yorkshire Terrier named Vicky Nina, and tested their ability to learn a new word after hearing it just four times. .
“We wanted to know under what conditions the gifted dogs could learn new words. To test this, we exposed Whiskey and Vicky Nina to the new words under two different conditions,” Claudia Fugazza, lead author of the study and researcher in the department. of ethology, said.
One scenario was an exclusion-based task and the other was within a social, playful context with their owners.
“Importantly, under both conditions, the dogs only heard the name of the new toy four times,” said Fugazza.
Presented with seven known toys and one new toy, the dogs could select the new toy when they were renamed. Researchers say this proves that dogs can choose by exclusion – when faced with a new word, they selected and picked up the only toy that didn’t have a known name.
However, when researchers presented two newly named toys and asked them to pick one up, they failed.
The research team also noted that both dogs were able to identify and retrieve newly named toys after hearing the name from their owners just four times while playing.
“Such rapid learning seems similar to the way human children acquire their vocabulary around the age of 2-3 years,” said Adam Miklósi, head of the ethology department and co-author of the study.
But not all dogs learn words this way.
In a test with 20 other dogs, researchers found that none of them learned the new toy names. It was concluded that, without formal training, the ability to learn words quickly is very rare and only present in a few gifted dogs.
Researchers also found that both Whiskey and Vicky Nina quickly forgot about the new toy names, and on some tests within a little over an hour of first learning them.
The research was published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
Dogs are known for their hearing ability and their ability to hear words and sounds well and they are able to distinguish speech sounds. But experts said it seems like they aren’t paying attention to all speech sounds.