Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years

Abstract

Long-term memory of words has a crucial role in the developing abilities of young ‎children to acquire language. In dogs, the ability to learn object labels is present in only a ‎small group of uniquely Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs. As they are very rare, little is ‎known about the mechanisms through which they acquire such large vocabularies. In the ‎current study, we tested the ability of five GWL dogs to retrieve 12 labelled objects two ‎years after the object-label mapping acquisition. The dogs proved to remember the labels ‎of between 3-9 objects. The results shed light on the process by which GWL dogs acquire ‎an exceptionally large vocabulary of object names. As memory plays a crucial role in ‎language development, these dogs supply a unique opportunity to study label retention ‎in a non-linguistic species.‎This seminar discusses the article: Dror S, Miklósi Á, Fugazza C. 2024 Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years. Biol. Lett. 20:20240208. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0208