Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years.

Abstract

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.