2023-12-15 10:15:05
It is normal for dogs that live with humans to know some human words. However, some dogs, who can be described as mentally gifted, know hundreds of human words, without having been formally trained in this regard and without even being exclusively the words of things that are evolutionarily important to the animal, such as names of foods, but rather the names of toys that that particular dog plays with. That is to say that for the dog, learning human vocabulary is not an effort marked by the survival instinct, but rather part of the fun of it.
Shany Dror’s team, from the Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, has carried out a pioneering study on dogs with this rare talent, in which they have verified the veracity of the phenomenon.
The dogs studied were 41, from 9 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Hungary.
Surprisingly, most dog owners reported that they did not intentionally teach their dogs the names of the toys, but rather that their dogs seemed to learn them spontaneously during unstructured play sessions.
Furthermore, the vast majority of dog owners who participated in the study had no professional training in dog training and the research team found no correlations between the owners’ level of experience in handling and training dogs and the ability of the dogs. dogs to select the correct toys by hearing their names. In other words, the credit for learning went to the dogs, not their owners.
The dog named Basket, 5 years old, from Texas, United States, with toys whose names she knows. (Photo: Elle Baumgartel)
More than 50 percent of owners’ dogs had a vocabulary of more than 100 toy names.
This study is only a first step in this fascinating line of research. Once the existence of the phenomenon has been scientifically proven, in successive studies this research team or others will delve step by step into the dimension of the phenomenon, its causes and other aspects.
The study is titled “A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs.” And it has been published in the academic journal Scientific Reports. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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