Watch your mouth! Some eavesdropping hounds have the language and complex social learning skills of 18-month-old humans.
Man’s best friend may also be man’s most attentive listener, with new research out of Europe concluding that dogs are able to learn new words for their toys just by overhearing their owners talking with each other.
This puts mutts at the same word learning level as 18 to 23-month-old children of the human variety.
To be fair to human babies, the dogs in question were a subset of 10 “gifted word learners” that had previously shown an aptitude for learning auditory labels of objects.
Seven of the 10 gifted dogs were border collies, with the balance made up by a labrador, a blue heeler mix and a mini Australian shepherd.
They were pitted against another 10 non-gifted dogs, all of whom were border collies.
In one experiment, the dog’s owner and a family member were instructed to handle a new toy and say its name repeatedly while the dog observed.
When later asked to retrieve this toy by name, seven out of the 10 gifted dogs were able to identify it correctly.
Eight gifted dogs were also tested on whether they could learn the name of an object without seeing it.
To do this, owners were instructed to show their pooch a new toy, then hide it from view while saying its name; the owners later asked the dogs to retrieve this toy.
Unfortunately, just four out of the eight dogs were able to retrieve the correct toy at a level that was significantly above chance.
“We demonstrated that Gifted Word Learner dogs have flexible skills for learning object labels, some of which are functionally similar to those possessed by children in their first years of life,” researchers wrote in Science.
“We cannot assume that these capacities in dogs reflect an evolutionary adaptation comparable to that of humans.
“It is still unclear how Gifted dogs developed their initial ability to learn object labels.
“As the phenomenon is very uncommon, we consider it likely that this ability results from idiosyncratic factors.
“Nevertheless, our findings show that the sociocognitive processes enabling learning from overheard speech are not exclusively human and can, under the right conditions, support label learning in a nonhuman species.”
Now that we know our dogs are, indeed, listening, this Back Page scribe would like to know when we can start teaching them to speak.
Why, you may ask, do I want this?
To paraphrase Freddie Prinze Jr.’s behind-the-scenes interview for Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed: “It’s a talking dog. Ya know?”
Whisper your story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au and she will tell her dog all about it.
