Abstract
Some domestic dogs learn to comprehend human words, although the nature and basis of this learning is unknown. In the studies presented here we investigated whether dogs learn words through an understanding of referential actions by humans rather than simple association. In three studies, each modelled on a study conducted with human infants, we confronted four word-experienced dogs with situations involving no spatial-temporal contiguity between the word and the referent; the only available cues were referential actions displaced in time from exposure to their referents. We found that no dogs were able to reliably link an object with a label based on social-pragmatic cues alone in all the tests. However, one dog did show skills in some tests, possibly indicating an ability to learn based on social-pragmatic cues.
Highlights
Different animal species can be taught to respond in particular ways to human words and other arbitrary symbols
One question is whether a dog would be able to learn a word-object relation by using the referential behaviour of a human speaker, which Rico’s behaviour would suggest, or whether dogs are generally just able to form those links by blind association based on spatial-temporal contiguity alone
In the following studies we examined whether dogs, specially trained to retrieve objects by their names, were able to learn the labels for new objects in contexts during which there was no spatial-temporal contiguity between the acoustic word and the visual referent
Summary
Different animal species can be taught to respond in particular ways to human words and other arbitrary symbols Rico was found to be able to learn new word-object links through exclusion and, to some degree, to store this knowledge in memory [9] see [8]. This performance is comparable to the fast mapping abilities only previously reported for human children [10,11,12]. One question is whether a dog would be able to learn a word-object relation by using the referential behaviour of a human speaker, which Rico’s behaviour would suggest, or whether dogs are generally just able to form those links by blind association based on spatial-temporal contiguity alone
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