An interesting study on a dog’s ability to understand or deduce the meaning of words states:

As many a dog owner will attest, our furry friends are listening. Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof they understand much of what they hear.

German researchers have found a border collie named Rico who understands more than 200 words and can learn new ones as quickly as many children.

Patti Strand, an American Kennel Club board member, called the report “good news for those of us who talk to our dogs.”

“Like parents of toddlers, we learned long ago the importance of spelling key words like bath, pill or vet when speaking in front of our dogs,” Strand said. “Thanks to the researchers who’ve proven that people who talk to their dogs are cutting-edge communicators, not just a bunch of eccentrics.”

The researchers found that Rico knows the names of dozens of play toys and can find the one called for by his owner. That is a vocabulary size about the same as apes, dolphins and parrots trained to understand words, the researchers say.

Rico can even take the next step, figuring out what a new word means.

The researchers put several known toys in a room along with one that Rico had not seen before. From a different room, Rico’s owner asked him to fetch a toy, using a name for the toy the dog had never heard.

The border collie, a breed known primarily for its herding ability, was able to go to the room with the toys and, seven times out of 10, bring back the one he had not seen before. The dog seemingly understood that because he knew the names of all the other toys, the new one must be the one with the unfamiliar name.

“Apparently he was able to link the novel word to the novel item based on exclusion learning, either because he knew that the familiar items already had names or because they were not novel,” said the researchers, led by Julia Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig

I can attest that my dog understands a lot of words, though the context is important. Politically Incorrect Dog likely thinks that his name means No because the only time he hears his name is when he’s misbehaving.

On a related note, I knew a contractor who had a border collie that he took to work with him. One day, the contractor was working on a roof. Had I not seen it, I wouldn’t believe it. The dog would climb the ladder and stay on the roof with the contractor. The contractor could look at the dog and say the name of a tool, for example he’d say Hammer. The dog would descend the ladder, go to the contractor’s open tool box in the back of his truck, grab the hammer and take it back up the ladder to the contractor. Truly amazing. Even more amazing was that the dog could differentiate between a flathead and Phillips screwdriver. My wife can’t even do that.

Posted in uncategorized on June 10th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |