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Basket the border collie seems to have a way with words. The 7-year-old dog, who resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, knows the names of at least 150 toys—”froggy,” “crayon box” and “Pop-Tart,” among them—and can retrieve them on command. Basket built her vocabulary thanks to the dedicated efforts of one of her owners, Elle Baumgartel-Austin. She began the language lessons when Basket was a puppy. “I would play with her, say the name of the toy—say the name of the toy a lot of times,” Baumgartel-Austin said. She started with 10 toys, adding more as Basket mastered them. “There never seemed to be a limit,” she said. “It’s basically like, how many toys could I feasibly store in my tiny apartment?” Now, in a new study, scientists have found that Basket, and other dogs that share her advanced word-learning ability, have a skill that puts them functionally on par with 18-month-old children: They can learn the names of new toys not only through direct instruction but also by eavesdropping on the conversations of their owners. Such sophisticated word learning appears to be rare among dogs, and recognizing the labels for specific objects is a far cry from acquiring language. But the study’s findings add to evidence that the cognitive and social abilities that underpin certain kinds of language learning are not limited to humans—and highlight just how adept dogs are at reading human signals. “They’re very good at picking up on these cues,” said Shany Dror, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and an author of the study. “They’re so good that they can pick up on them equally well when the cues are directed to the dog or when they’re directed to someone else.” The study, which Dror conducted at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, was published in the journal Science on Thursday. Although many dogs can understand simple commands, like “sit” or “stay,” picking up the names of specific objects — a skill known as label learning—appears to be a much tougher task. Scientists do not fully understand why. But over the past two decades or so, scientists have identified a handful of outliers, canine prodigies that know the names for dozens or even hundreds of toys and can remember such labels for years. “They accumulate these huge vocabularies,” Dror said. Herding dogs—and, in particular, border collies—seem to have a particular knack for this kind of word learning, perhaps because breeders once favored animals that paid especially close attention to what their owners said and did. But even among these breeds, label learning appears to be rare.
