Learning: Dogs Also Quickly Memorize New Words

A Hungarian study shows that some dogs have a special ability to learn new words after just a few attempts. Four repetitions of the name of the new object were enough for the two dogs in the study to incorporate the information into their familiar vocabulary. But not all dogs possess this ability to learn “language”... A measure of canine intelligence is the ability to learn the name of an object after just a few repetitions. This cognitive ability for rapid learning is also observed in children. Some dogs can thus quickly associate the physical characteristics of an object with its abstract label—that is, a word or sound that corresponds to it. According to a new study from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (Hungary), while most dogs are not capable of this, a few exceptions exist. Whiskey, a Norwegian Border Collie, and Vicky Nina, a Brazilian Yorkshire Terrier—both exceptionally gifted—were able to learn new words after hearing them just four times. These two dogs already had a rich vocabulary—about 60 words for the first and about 40 for the second. Whiskey and Vicky Nina were exposed to new words or objects under two different conditions: either during an exclusion task or in a playful context with their owners. In both cases, the dogs heard the name of the new toy only four times. During the exclusion trial, the dogs demonstrated that they were able to select the new toy from among seven other familiar objects when their owner said the new name. Whiskey correctly retrieved the requested new object in 40 out of 40 trials (100%), and Vicky Nina in 21 out of 40 trials (52.5%). This confirms that dogs can identify the new object by excluding all the others whose names they already know and selecting the one that is unknown to them. However, their success is not based on actually learning the new word associated with a specific object. Instead, these dogs did learn two new words in the context of play and interactions with their owner, who pointed to the toy while saying its name. Whiskey identified the correct toy in 17 out of 24 trials (71% success rate), and Vicky Nina in 15 out of 20 trials (75%). Nevertheless, with only four repetitions of each word, the dogs’ recall did not last. If the test was repeated ten minutes or one hour after learning the new words, the dogs were no longer able—or only barely able—to remember them. Gradual consolidation is therefore necessary to reinforce learning over the long term. This type of rapid learning is similar to how children acquire their vocabulary around the ages of 2 to 3. Twenty other dogs, less known for their learning abilities, took the same tests and failed. This ability to learn words quickly, without formal training, is therefore rare in dogs and is present only in a few specially trained individuals.