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ramanth
06-10-2004, 10:26 AM
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20040610/sc_nm/science_dog_dc


Can Dogs Speak? No, But They Understand, Study Says

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday.

Rico can figure out which object his master wants even if he has never heard the word before, the researchers say.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, may not surprise many dog owners. But they are certain to re-ignite a debate over what language is and whether it is unique to humans.

Rico's abilities seem to follow a process called fast mapping, seen when young children start to learn to speak and understand language, they report.

Fast-mapping allows a child to form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a new word the first time they hear or see it.

"(Rico) lives as a pet with his owners and was reported by them to know the labels of more than 200 items, mostly children's toys and balls, which he correctly retrieved upon request," Julia Fischer of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and colleagues wrote.

His owners say "Rico, wo ist der (where is the) Banane (banana)," or "BigMac" or "Panda," and the dog searches, out of sight of the owner, until he finds the object.

Fischer and colleagues set up experiments to test the dog, and are satisfied that he understands the words.

"For instance, he can be instructed to put them into a box or to bring them to a certain person," they wrote.


MORE WORDS THAN PARROTS


"Rico's 'vocabulary size' is comparable to that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea lions and parrots."

When they put a new object into a room filled with old objects, Rico was able to fetch it 7 out of 10 times, evidently figuring out that the new word must refer to the new object.

Four weeks later, he apparently remembered this new word about half the time. "This retrieval rate is comparable to the performance of 3-year-old toddlers," they wrote.

"Undoubtedly, he is a highly motivated dog," they noted, adding that border collies are bred to respond to human commands.

But, they added, "our results strongly support the view that a seemingly complex human linguistic skill previously described only in human children may be mediated by simpler cognitive building blocks that are also present in another species."

Obviously, they said, children have a deeper and broader understanding of words. But it could be that some of the mechanisms underlying language evolved "before early humans were ready to talk."

Psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University in Connecticut, an expert in how people learn the meaning of words, said not even chimpanzees have demonstrated such "fast-mapping" abilities.

"Perhaps Rico is doing precisely what a child does, just not as well," Bloom wrote in a commentary. "Rico's limitations might reflect differences in degree, not in kind."

But Bloom also noted that a child's understanding of language can include abstract concepts.

"When children learn a word such as 'sock,' they do not interpret it as 'bring-the-sock' or 'go-to-the-sock,' and they do not merely associate it with socks," he said.

"Can Rico follow an instruction not to fetch an item, just as one can tell a child not to touch something? Rico's abilities are fascinating, but until we have answers to these sorts of questions, it is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not."