At a small reception following a talk I about your interpretation Chaser is perhaps the most linguistically advanced dog tested so far. Owned by John Pilley, a professor emeritus of psychology from Wofford College in South Carolina, Chaser’s language training began when she was a puppy. Most of the words she has learned are nouns, namely labels for toys. Her verified vocabulary is around 1,000 words, which, as I noted in my talk, is the equivalent of what we might expect from a 3½- year-old human child. The developmental psychologist objected to my drawing a parallel between language learning in dogs and children. “You have to take into account the process of learning, not just the number of words the dogs learned,” she said. “Children learn most of their language by watching and listening to the people around them speaking and engaging in various behaviours. Dogs don’t.” “Dogs do learn by just listening and watching,” I assured her. “Many dog owners will tell you that all they have to do is to say the word ‘walk’ for their dogs to get excited and rush to the door. I had a dog who, if he overheard the word ‘bath’, would skitter around to find a hiding place.”
Each dog was taught to retrieve specific objects using one of two different methods – the “Reward Technique”, which had been used to train Chaser, or the “Watch and Listen Technique”. With the “Reward Technique”, teaching a dog how to retrieve a red rubber boot toy might begin with only that toy out on the floor. If the dog nosed at it when the experimenter said the word “boot”, he would get a food reward. Later, the dog would have to pick the boot up in his mouth to get the reward, and eventually he would only be rewarded for bringing the toy to the experimenter when asked to “get the boot”. When the dog responded to the command correctly three times in a row, the experimenter moved him on to the testing phase. All three red rubber toys were displayed and the dog was told to “get the boot.” The length of time the dog took to learn the task measured how well the training worked.
TESTING DOGS TO SEE HOW THEY LEARN WORDS I described a study by Sue McKinley and Robert Young, of the Department of Animal Science at De Montfort University in Lincolnshire in the UK. In this study, dogs learned labels by watching a person interact with someone the dogs knew (usually their owner) and another person. Each dog had to learn to identify a particular toy by name and retrieve it on command. Two sets of rubber toys were used. One set consisted of three red rubber dog toys (a boot, a fire extinguisher, and a strawberry) while the other set consisted of three yellow rubber dog toys (a saxophone, a toothbrush, and a hammer). One toy was chosen randomly from each group with the idea that the dogs would learn to retrieve it when given the object’s name.
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