Border Collie comprehends names of over 1000 objects
Read Time:3 Minute, 31 Second
Researchers at Wofford College discovered that a border collie comprehends the names of over 1,000 objects, differentiating between names of objects and orders to fetch them. This research deepens the findings of researchers in Germany, who had discovered a dog that knew the names of a couple of hundred objects. Important questions were left open as to how far a dog could go, and whether the dog really understood that the object names were nouns and not commands to retrieve the object.
John Pilley and Alliston Reid answered two central questions with their research: How large can a dog’s vocabulary become if given extensive training? What do dogs actually understand when we use human language to communicate with them? These findings are published in the Elsevier journal Behavioural Processes.
The authors demonstrated that their dog, Chaser, learned the names of 1,022 objects — no upper limit is apparent — they stopped training the dog after three years due to their time constraints, not because the dog could not learn more names. This study demonstrates Chaser’s ability to learn the names of proper nouns, and her extensive vocabulary was tested repeatedly under carefully controlled conditions. The authors admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1022 toys better than they could. Chaser’s ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object, revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1,022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, an extensive vocabulary, and a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.
Their second experiment demonstrated that Chaser really understands that these are names, and not commands to fetch the object. In order to test independence of meaning of nouns and commands, the authors randomly combined nouns with commands to see if Chaser would produce the correct behavior toward the correct object in each trial. Without special training, Chaser responded to each combination correctly, even on the first trial, demonstrating that Chaser understood that the commands and proper-noun names had independent meanings. The dog understands that names refer to particular objects, independent of the action requested involving that object.
Their third experiment demonstrated that the dog also understands names for categories of objects or common nouns, and not just individual names or proper nouns. For instance, she learned that name “toy” referred to the 1022 objects she was allowed to play with, each with a proper-noun name. By forming categories represented by common nouns, Chaser mapped one label onto many objects. Chaser also demonstrated that she could map up to three labels onto the same object without error. For example, Chaser knew the proper-noun names of all objects used in the research. Chaser also mapped the common noun “toy” onto these same objects. Her additional success with the two common nouns “ball” and “frisbee” demonstrates that she mapped a third label onto these objects. Her demonstrations of one-to-many and many-to-one noun/object mappings reveal flexibility in the referential nature of words in border collies.
Each of these experiments showed that the dog could learn names using procedures involving associative learning. Their fourth experiment demonstrated that Chaser could also learn names by exclusion — inferred the name of a novel object by exclusion of familiar already-named objects. Retention of these names using this procedure was limited to short periods, however, just as usually observed with children.
According to Alliston Reid, “This research is important because it demonstrates that dogs, like children, can develop extensive vocabularies and understand that certain words represent individual objects and other words represent categories of objects, independent in meaning of what one is asked to do with those objects.”
Additional research is needed to determine whether these impressive language abilities are shared by other breeds of dogs. This work encourages research into how the historical relationships between humans and dogs may have influenced the abilities of dogs to communicate with humans, and whether this influence is unique to dogs.
Article courtesy of Science Daily
Tip o’ the hat to Morgan Williams for the link
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
I have an elderly border collie. She has a huge vocabulary, maybe a dozen words, or that’s what she wants me to think.
I have always verbally communicated with my dogs and cats, they understand many phrases, like ‘get down’ ‘no’ ‘give me the ball’ or ‘give me the sock’Our chihuahua mix also knows the difference between his various toys when commanded to get one or the other.
I also have noticed that people who do not communicate with their pets own animals that destroy property and are socially inept.
All 7 of mine understand the simple things Dusty, just like you said. They know the basics and they know cookie, ball, ride, leave it, and etc. They do not, however know anywhere near 1,000 different referents. Then again I’m not sure I know 1,000 different referents 🙂 Right on that connection also by the way.
We rescue abused/abandoned cats and dogs. What really freaked me out was when the cats learned the meaning of phrases like ‘go lay down’ and ‘get me the ball’. Several of my cats will retrieve objects when I toss them and we play like that for hours. I thought cats couldn’t be taught things like dogs could.