""What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Lorand University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna."
""This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities.""
""There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it.""
Some dogs can learn a brand new word, such as the name of an unfamiliar toy, by overhearing brief interactions between two people. Gifted dogs can infer that a word refers to an object even when that object is out of sight if their favorite human is looking at the location where the object is hidden. Dogs rely on social communication and human social cues and gaze to map spoken labels to referents. Words directed to dogs are often paired with tone or gestures, and only a small subset of dogs reliably learn label-object distinctions.
Read at www.npr.org
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