Abstract
We investigated the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in a five year old Border Collie: the generalization of a word referring to an object to other objects of the same shape, also known as shape bias. Our first experiment confirmed a solid history of word learning in the dog, thus making it possible for certain object features to have become central in his word comprehension. Using an experimental paradigm originally employed to establish shape bias in children and human adults we taught the dog arbitrary object names (e.g. dax) for novel objects. Two experiments showed that when briefly familiarized with word-object mappings the dog did not generalize object names to object shape but to object size. A fourth experiment showed that when familiarized with a word-object mapping for a longer period of time the dog tended to generalize the word to objects with the same texture. These results show that the dog tested did not display human-like word comprehension, but word generalization and word reference development of a qualitatively different nature compared to humans. We conclude that a shape bias for word generalization in humans is due to the distinct evolutionary history of the human sensory system for object identification and that more research is necessary to confirm qualitative differences in word generalization between humans and dogs.
Highlights
The question of whether dogs share any linguistic abilities with humans is the focus of much recent research [1,2,3,4]
This paper considers an experimental investigation of word comprehension in a domestic dog, compares it with word comprehension in humans, and considers what this comparison may tell us about the evolution of word comprehension in humans
We have shown that word generalization and the developmental path for acquiring words is qualitatively different in Gable compared to humans
Summary
The question of whether dogs share any linguistic abilities with humans is the focus of much recent research [1,2,3,4]. Chaser showed the ability to associate a word (for example, toy) with categories of objects as can children and human adults Despite these apparently impressive feats of verbal referencing, several arguments have been put forward to dispute claims that word knowledge in the domestic dog is of the same quality as word knowledge in humans. In our paper we focus on whether word reference in the domestic dog is determined by a shape bias, or whether object size or texture play a role in generalizing the meaning of comprehended words to new objects, as originally investigated by LSJ. After presenting our experimental results we consider whether it is possible to explain any object feature bias on the basis of the input that Gable had received in the three years of word learning prior to our testing
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