Dogs may have the comprehension necessary for language
Rico, a smart border collie, was spotted on television by Julia Fischer and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. With a "vocabulary" of 200 words, Rico showed exceptional ability in retrieving specific toys when asked to fetch them.
The researchers decided to test whether Rico's ability was based on understanding and if he could learn and remember new words. They placed a new toy among his favourites and asked Rico to fetch it, using the unfamiliar name. The dog nearly always did. This suggests that Rico is using a system called "fast-mapping", which young children use to learn new words by matching new words to new objects. The study is the first to show fast-mapping in animals.
"It shows that fast-mapping is not specific to humans, that it probably has a more general purpose in figuring things out in your world," says Fischer.
"Dog owners often boast about the communicative and social abilities of their pets, and this study seems to vindicate them," writes Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, US, in a commentary accompanying the study in the journal Science.
Full article....The New Scientist
Câini de înþelegere ar putea sã fi necesare pentru limba - Dogs may have the comprehension necessary for language - articole medicale engleza - startsanatate