“We suspect that there might be a genetic basis for this talent,” she says, “but for the moment we don’t know. Fugazza and her team are now hard at work finding out how and why certain dogs have such advanced linguistic skills. Perhaps even more fascinatingly, most of the dogs that have this trait seem to be Border Collies.ĭr. In fact, astonishingly, some dogs could learn the name of a toy after just four repetitions. Yet the six dogs that participated in the Genius Dog Challenge were able to learn the names of objects with no training. Chaser, shown here with her toys, learned the names of more than one thousand objects. Today, we’ve gained insight into how the smartest dogs learn. We trained a group of dogs very intensively for three months, we included a group of puppies around three months old and a group of adult dogs, and none of them could learn any words.” So we started investigating and we found that, irrespective of the age when you start training, most dogs do not learn the name of objects. “But there was about learning the names of objects. “We know that dogs can learn commands or cues or sound stimuli or any stimulus for a behavior, which is basically a process of association,” Genius Dog researcher Dr.

Magyari’s study, but names for toys-a category of word that dogs seem to have much more trouble picking up. Perhaps even more interestingly, the words they learned were not command words, like those tested in Dr. All six dogs successfully learned between 10 and 12 words in one week. These pups are currently the subjects of another study at Eötvös Loránd University, and recently made headlines after going to head-to-head in a live Genius Dog Challenge, which challenged them to learn up to 12 new words in the space of a week.

Then there are the exceptions: dogs who can learn hundreds of vocabulary words. Some Dogs Really Are Linguistically Gifted They just have their own way of processing the information. In short: keep talking to your dog, and keep using clear commands while training them. It is just that they probably don’t think that those differences are important.” “So it doesn’t mean even that they don’t hear these differences. “There are studies that show that after some training, some dogs can differentiate similar-sounding words,” Dr. It just seems that their attention isn’t on the phonetic details-and yet even that isn’t set in stone. “If some owners are thinking that it doesn’t matter what I say to my dog because the dog is watching the gestures I do or finding out from context what he or she should do, it’s not entirely true. Lilla Magyari, one of the researchers on the project, notes that first and foremost, it means that dogs are listening to your speech. So what does all this mean for you and your pup? Dr. This kind of non-detailed phonetic recognition is also the way babies process speech up to the age of about 14 months, and goes some way toward explaining why most dogs can only learn a small handful of words, since a big vocabulary requires precision. This means that dogs aren’t listening to or learning words in quite the same way as humans-or at least, not in the same way as adult humans. But when a nonsense word sounds just like an instruction word, they don’t distinguish at all. They found that when it comes to distinguishing an instruction word from a totally different nonsense word, dogs’ brains process speech very quickly-on a similar timescale to humans, in fact. Researchers used a groundbreaking non-invasive method to observe dogs’ cognitive responses to three types of word: instruction words they already knew ( like sit, stay, or down), nonsense words that sound similar to those known instruction words, and nonsense words that sound nothing like the known instruction words. That’s because, as recently demonstrated in a study from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, dogs don’t access phonetic details when they’re listening to human speech. Try telling your dog to “sit” or “sid” and you’ll likely get the same result: a good pup in a nice sitting posture. The Average Dog Doesn’t Distinguish the Details of Human Speech

We’ve all heard a story of a whip-smart dog who learned strategic words, like “walk” or “treat.” But do those dogs really understand human language, and if so, what are the limits on their language learning? A burgeoning field of scientific research is beginning to find some answers.

Shush puppy