“These special dogs learn very fast, so it is not surprising that when we conducted the test with the dogs, the average number of toy names they knew was 29, but when we published the results, more than 50 percent of the owners reported that their dogs had already acquired a vocabulary of over 100 toy names.”
I'm always looking for new studies on dog intelligence and was extremely interested in an open-access study called "A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner Dogs" that was just published in Scientific Reports by Shany Dror and her colleagues, who work in the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.
The research documented the ability to learn toy names in a variety of purebred dogs and a few mixed breeds. This novel study reveals characteristics that are shared among a group of uniquely gifted dogs called Gifted Word Learners (GWL) and I'm pleased that Shany could answer a few questions about this most important study. Here's what she had to say about this extremely important research project.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you and your colleagues do this research?
Shany Dror: My background is in animal training and I originally joined the Family Dog Project as a dog trainer. My task at the time was to train typical family dogs to learn the names of toys, as we wanted to work with these dogs in a variety of experiments aimed at understanding how dogs comprehend labels and mentally represent objects. However, to our big surprise, and despite the efforts of the dog owners, none of the typical dogs seem to learn the names of the toys.
At the same time, we were monitoring the progress of six dogs that already had a vocabulary of toy names. In the same timeframe, these six dogs were able to learn between 10-37 new toy names. We concluded that the ability to learn object labels varies qualitatively among dogs. In other words, some dogs can be categorized as "Gifted Word Learners" (GWL dogs). While this opens many possibilities for studying the origin of exceptional talent in a nonhuman species, we were still left with a big problem; we had only six dogs that actually displayed this ability.
To find more of these rare dogs we conducted the Genius Dog Challenge, a series of experiments that were live broadcasted over YouTube and served as both a research project and a social media campaign. Over five years, we managed to reach a large sample of 41 GWL dogs from nine different countries. The current study summarizes what we have learned about these dogs’ backgrounds, their owners' backgrounds, and the process through which they came to know the names of toys.
MB: Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important work?
SD: Our work aims to better understand dogs—how they perceive their environment, mentally represent it, and comprehend our communication attempts. It is often claimed that language is a uniquely human ability that has shaped the way we evolved. Our research also asks how language evolved and developed in the human brain and what elements are shared among the human brain and other mammalian brains. So, I think this research would be of interest to anyone wanting to better understand dogs, humans, and the language that occasionally stands between them.
MB: How does your research differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
SD: Because GWL dogs are so rare, so far there has been very little research about them. In the last 20 years, there have been only eight articles published on the topic (not counting our own publications), and these tested the same six dogs. All the previous studies were conducted with a very small sample of only one or two dogs.
So until now, all we knew about the background of GWL dogs and the way they came to know the names of toys came from their owners’ anecdotal reports. The current study is the first conducted with a relatively large sample of 41 dogs. This study moves us from dealing with a few anecdotal reports to examining scientific data.
MB: What did you learn—and are you hopeful that as people learn more about canine intelligence, they will treat dogs better?
SD: We know that most dogs can easily learn action labels like “sit” or “down” but struggle to learn even two object labels. What makes GWL dogs unique is the astonishing ease and speed with which they learn object labels.
The finding that surprised us the most in this study was that the majority of the owners didn’t intentionally train their dogs to learn the names of toys. The owners reported that they just played with their dogs with toys—then one day, they noticed that the dogs knew the names of the toys. At this point, they started giving the dogs more toys. Thus, the GWL dogs seem to spontaneously learn what most dogs do not achieve, even with intensive training.
When we started to study object-label learning in dogs, we suspected that once a dog presents this ability, there is nothing that limits his or her potential to achieve a large vocabulary. The fact that 50 percent of the GWL dogs participating in the study were reported to have a vocabulary of over 100 toys supports this hypothesis.
We know that owners have a large influence on their dogs, so we hypothesized that the owners’ background may facilitate the dogs’ ability to learn object labels. Surprisingly, not only did the majority of owners lack a professional background in dog training, but there were also no correlations between the owners' past experience in rearing dogs and the dogs’ performance in our tests. We did, however, find that most dogs were adopted when they were younger than 10 weeks old and lived in a single-dog household.
This study helps us to better understand the background of GWL dogs, but we still do not know how they are able to learn object labels so rapidly and in what other aspects they differ from typical family dogs.
Discovering what makes GWL dogs so unique may shed light on the similarities and differences in the ways humans and dogs think. This understanding is crucial for our relationship with our best friends—and I hope that as it improves, we will be able to take better care of them.
References
In conversation with Shany Dror, a PhD candidate at the Department of Ethology, ELTE University, Budapest. Her current research looks into the evolutionary origin of language by examining language-related abilities in a group of exceptionally talented dogs. Her previous research examined the potential use of honeybees to deter Asian elephants from entering crop fields. She has extensive experience training a variety of animal species including pigs, bats, horses, rabbits, and dogs to perform various (often bizarre) tasks.
Dogs Demystified: An A-to-Z Guide to All Things Canine, New World Library, 2023. The Best Ways to Build Lasting Connection With a Dog; The Chaser Initiative: Dogs, Children, Play, and Praise;
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