Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány P. s 1c, 6th Floor , Budapest 1117, Hungary.
Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine , Vienna, Austria.
Biol Lett. 2024 Sep;20(9):20240208. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0208. Epub 2024 Sep 4.
Long-term memory of words has a crucial role in the developing abilities of young children to acquire language. In dogs, the ability to learn object labels is present in only a small group of uniquely gifted word learner (GWL) dogs. As they are very rare, little is known about the mechanisms through which they acquire such large vocabularies. In the current study, we tested the ability of five GWL dogs to retrieve 12 labelled objects 2 years after the object-label mapping acquisition. The dogs proved to remember the labels of between three and nine objects. The results shed light on the process by which GWL dogs acquire an exceptionally large vocabulary of object names. As memory plays a crucial role in language development, these dogs provide a unique opportunity to study label retention in a non-linguistic species.
长期记忆在儿童语言习得能力的发展中起着至关重要的作用。在狗中，只有一小部分具有独特天赋的词汇学习（GWL）狗具有学习物体标签的能力。由于它们非常罕见，因此对于它们获得如此大量词汇的机制知之甚少。在当前的研究中，我们测试了五只 GWL 狗在获得物体-标签映射后 2 年回忆 12 个标记物体的能力。结果表明，这些狗可以记住三到九个物体的标签。这些结果揭示了 GWL 狗获得异常大量物体名称词汇的过程。由于记忆在语言发展中起着至关重要的作用，因此这些狗为在非语言物种中研究标签保留提供了一个独特的机会。
