Previous studies have shown that humans between the ages of two to three typically learn to associate words with the shapes of objects, rather than their size or texture<\/strong>. For example, toddlers who learn what a ‘ball’ is and are then presented other objects with similar shapes, sizes or textures will identify a similarly-shaped object as ‘ball’, rather than one of the same size or texture.<\/p>\n Earlier research with dogs has shown that they can learn to associate words with categories of objects (such as ‘toy’)<\/strong>, but whether their learning process was the same as that of humans was unknown.<\/p>\n In this new study, the scientists presented Gable, a five year old Border Collie, with similar choices to see if this ‘shape bias’ exists in dogs. They found that after a brief training period, Gable learned to associate the name of an object with its size, identifying other objects of similar size by the same name. After a longer period of exposure to both a name and an object, the dog learned to associate a word to other objects of similar textures, but not to objects of similar shape.<\/p>\n According to the authors, these results suggest that dogs (or at least Gable) process and associate words with objects in qualitatively different ways than humans do<\/strong>. They add that this may be due to differences in how evolutionary history has shaped human and dog senses of perceiving shape, texture or size.<\/p>\n The bottom line: Though your dog understands the command “Fetch the ball”, but he may think of the object in a very different way than you do when he hears it<\/strong>. As the authors explain, “Where shape matters for us, size or texture matters more for your dog. This study shows for the first time that there is a qualitative difference in word comprehension in the dog compared to word comprehension in humans.”<\/p>\n Citation: van der Zee E, Zulch H, Mills D (2012) Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris<\/em>): Is Shape Important? PLoS ONE<\/em> 7(11): e49382. doi:10.1371\/ journal.pone.0049382<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Public Library of Science press release via EurekAlert!: Dogs learning to associate words with objects form these associations in different ways than humans do, according to research published… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,333],"tags":[25,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8556"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13603,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8556\/revisions\/13603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Child](\"http:\/\/www.therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/ChildAndDog.jpg\")
Dogs learning to associate words with objects form these associations in different ways than humans do<\/strong>, according to research published November 21 in the open access journal PLOS ONE<\/em> by Emile van der Zee and colleagues from the University of Lincoln, UK.<\/p>\n