"Most dog owners are aware that their pooch is smart enough to know a few choice phraseswalkies, for instance, or, perhaps more likely, time for dinner. Some particularly intelligent canines can even identify more than 100 words. And incredibly, a few genius doggies may be able to learn words not by being taught but purely by eavesdropping on human conversations."
"For comparison, that is about the same language learning skills as an 18-month-old child. The researchers asked dog owners to have a conversation with another person in their household and name-drop two new toys in front of their pets but without directly addressing the animals. Afterward the owners placed the pair of toys in a separate room alongside a handful of others and asked their dogs to retrieve one of the novel playthings."
"With some of the dogs, it's like they had no doubt about what they were supposed to be doing, says Shany Dror, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and a co-author on the study. They would just go into the room, straight to the toy that they knew [was] the new toy and [then brought] it immediately."
A small group of dogs can learn names of new toys simply by overhearing owners name the items during conversations. Owners named two novel toys aloud in front of the dogs without addressing them and later placed those toys in another room among other objects. When asked to retrieve one of the named toys, the dogs selected the correct novel toy after overhearing the conversation as effectively as when the toys had been shown directly. Some dogs immediately went to the new toy and brought it, indicating attentive processing of human labeling during social interactions. Performance matched that of 18-month-old children.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]