Dogs learn words like children
Scientists in Germany tested a border collie and found it had a vocabulary of 200 words.
Nine-year-old Rico, who lives with his owners in Dortmund, could also pick up the meaning of new words on first hearing.
Researchers said its language learning skills were comparable with a three-year-old child.
Rico's owner, Susanne Baus, began teaching him to fetch different objects by name when he was less than a year old.
She would would place three different toys in different locations around the flat and ask the dog to retrieve one. He was rewarded with food or play and soon developed an impressive word count.
Dr Julia Fischer and colleagues from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig decided to put him to the test.
In a series of controlled experiments, he correctly retrieved 37 out of 40 toys from a collection when its name was called.
The scientists estimated that Rico's vocabulary was comparable with language-trained chimpanzees, sea lions, dolphins and parrots.
They then tested Rico's ability to learn new words, placing seven well-known toys in a room with one that the dog had never seen before.
His owner then asked him to fetch the toy using an unfamiliar word. Seven times out of 10 he brought back the correct toy. A month later, the dog correctly remembered the name of the new toy.
"This retrieval rate is comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers," the researchers said.
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Now if we could teach toddlers to go to the bathroom in the backyard.......
Just kidding!
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