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Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for "Fast Mapping"

Authors:
Juliane Kaminski at University of Portsmouth
Juliane Kaminski
Josep Call at University of St Andrews
Josep Call
Julia Fischer at German Primate Center
Julia Fischer
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Abstract

During speech acquisition, children form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a new word after only a single exposure—a process dubbed “fast mapping.” Here we provide evidence that a border collie, Rico, is able to fast map. Rico knew the labels of over 200 different items. He inferred the names of novel items by exclusion learning and correctly retrieved those items right away as well as 4 weeks after the initial exposure. Fast mapping thus appears to be mediated by general learning and memory mechanisms also found in other animals and not by a language acquisition device that is special to humans.
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DOI: 10.1126/science.1097859
, 1682 (2004); 304Science
et al.Juliane Kaminski,
"Fast Mapping"
Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for
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steroids in asthma may be mediated, in part, by
their ability to increase pH and decrease AM-
Case bioactivity. In combination with studies
highlighting the expression of the chitinase-like
proteins, YM-1 and YM-2 (18) and AMCase
(19) in animal models, these studies emphasize
the potential importance of chitinases as mediators
of Th2 responses. The present studies also suggest
that AMCase is a potential therapeutic target that
can be manipulated to control asthma and other
forms of IL-13– or Th2-mediated pathology.
References and Notes
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20. This work was supported by grants from NIH (R01-
HL-61904, R01-HL-64242, R01-HL-66571, and P50-
HL-56389) to J.A.E. and grants from NIH and Amer-
ican Lung Association (R01-HL-074095 and Research
Grant, respectively) to Z.Z. We thank K. Bertier and S.
Ardito for their excellent secretarial assistance and S.
Chen for her technical assistance.
Supporting Online Material
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5677/1678/
DC1
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S11
Table S1
5 January 2004; accepted 5 May 2004
Word Learning in a Domestic
Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping”
Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, Julia Fischer*
During speech acquisition, children form quick and rough hypotheses about
the meaning of a new word after only a single exposure—a process dubbed
“fast mapping.” Here we provide evidence that a border collie, Rico, is able
to fast map. Rico knew the labels of over 200 different items. He inferred
the names of novel items by exclusion learning and correctly retrieved those
items right away as well as 4 weeks after the initial exposure. Fast mapping
thus appears to be mediated by general learning and memory mechanisms
also found in other animals and not by a language acquisition device that
is special to humans.
The rate at which most toddlers acquire their
vocabulary is astounding: From about 2 years
of age, typical English-speaking children in-
corporate about 10 new words per day into
their vocabulary until they reach an average
vocabulary size of 60,000 words by the time
they graduate from high school (1). Several
studies have shown that children have a set of
operating principles that guide the task of
word learning (2–4 ). However, it remains a
matter of debate which of these principles are
unique to language learning and which are
more general cognitive abilities that may be
shared with other living creatures. We inves-
tigated the outer limits of a domestic dog’s
“word learning”; that is, his ability to acquire
the relation between a word and the object
that this word refers to (the referent). By
studying his retrieval behavior with famil-
iar and novel items, we specifically tested
whether he would be able to infer the ref-
erent of a new word by exclusion learning:
that is, to “fast map” (5–7 ) and retain this
knowledge over time.
The study animal, Rico, is a border collie
and was born in December 1994. He lives as
a pet with his owners and was reported by
them to know the labels of over 200 items,
mostly children’s toys and balls, which he
correctly retrieved upon request. Rico was
first introduced to fetching items when he
was 10 months of age, when his owners
placed three different items in different loca-
tions around the flat and asked the dog for
one of these items. Rico was rewarded with
food or play if he fetched the correct object.
He was gradually familiarized with an in-
creasing number of items. Typically, the
owners introduced new items by presenting
them and saying their name two or three
times. Rico then got the chance to play with
the new item, and it was subsequently inte-
grated into the collection of other items.
However, it remained unclear whether a
“Clever Hans” (8) effect might account for
his performance. The first experiment was
therefore designed to assess Rico’s ability to
correctly retrieve his various items under
controlled conditions. We randomly assigned
the 200 items he was reportedly familiar with
to 20 sets of 10 different items each. While
the owner waited with the dog in a separate
room, the experimenter arranged a set of
items in the experimental room and then
joined the owner and the dog. Next, the ex-
perimenter instructed the owner to request the
dog to bring two randomly chosen items (one
after the other) from the adjacent room (9).
While Rico searched for the requested item,
he could not see the owner or the experiment-
er. He retrieved a total of 37 out of 40 items
correctly (binomial test, P ⬍ 0.001). This
experiment showed that Rico indeed knew
the labels of these items. One may raise the
objection that the words may in fact consti-
tute one-word propositions, such as “fetch-
the-sock.” However, anecdotal evidence sug-
gests that he indeed understands that the
words refer to the objects. For instance, he
can be instructed to put an item into a box or
to bring it to a certain person. More system-
atic testing will be needed to specify his
understanding of entire phrases. In any case,
the number of labeled objects is substan-
tially larger than those reported in previous
studies with dogs, where subjects were test-
ed with only three to five objects (10, 11).
Rico’s “vocabulary size” is comparable to
that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea
lions, and parrots (12).
To assess Rico’s ability to fast map, we
placed a novel item together with seven fa-
miliar items in an adjacent room (total n ⫽ 8
items requested in 8 trials). In this so-called
identification task, we conducted a total of 10
sessions in which we introduced 10 novel
items. In the first trial of a session, the owner
always asked Rico to bring a familiar item,
and in the second or third trial asked him to
bring an item using the novel name (9). After
the completion of a session, Rico was al-
lowed to take a break before another session
commenced. Rico retrieved the novel item
from the first session on and was overall
correct in 7 out of 10 sessions (binomial test,
P ⬍ 0.001). Apparently, he was able to link
the novel word to the novel item based on
exclusion learning, either because he knew
that the familiar items already had names or
because they were not novel. Four weeks
after the initial and sole exposure, we as-
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psy-
chology, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthro-
pology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-
mail: fischer@eva.mpg.de
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sessed Rico’s retention of the relation be-
tween the novel word and the novel item. In
this retention task, we only used those objects
that Rico had successfully retrieved in the
identification task. In between the identifica-
tion and the retention task, he had no access
to the target items. We placed a target item
together with four completely novel and four
familiar items in a room (total n ⫽ 9 items)
and asked him first to bring a familiar item
and subsequently (in the second or third trial)
to bring the target item. Four weeks after the
identification task, he correctly retrieved the
target item in 3 out of 6 sessions (P ⬍ 0.1).
This retrieval rate is comparable to the per-
formance of 3-year-old toddlers (1, 5). In the
other cases, he brought one of the unfamiliar
items and never one of the familiar items. We
then replicated the experiment, first conducting
a new set of identification tasks using novel
items. When he was tested for retention of the
novel word-object combinations 10 min after
the identification task, he correctly retrieved the
target item in 4 out of 6 trials (P ⬍ 0.02).
These experiments demonstrate that Rico
reliably associates arbitrary acoustic patterns
(human words) with specific items in his
environment. Apparently, Rico’s extensive
experience with acquiring the names of ob-
jects allowed him to establish the rule that
things can have names. Consequently, he was
able to deduce the referent of a new word on
the basis of the principle of exclusion when
presented with a novel item along with a set
of familiar items (13, 14 ). This corresponds
to the acquisition of the novel-name–
nameless category principle (3) and also to
the avoidance of lexical overlap described in
children (4 ). Moreover, Rico was able to
store this knowledge about the link between
word and object in memory, because he was
able to correctly retrieve the target item from
a set of novel and familiar items both imme-
diately after introduction of the novel word-
object combination and 4 weeks later.
It remains a matter for further empirical
investigation whether Rico’s accomplish-
ments are based on an exceptional mind or
a result of his extensive exposure to many
word-object combinations. Undoubtedly,
he is a highly motivated dog, and some of
his talent may be accounted for by the fact
that border collies are working dogs (15).
More generally, dogs appear to have been
evolutionarily selected for attending to the
communicative intentions of humans (16–
18). Nevertheless, we assume that Rico’s
performance can be decomposed into a set
of simpler mechanisms. These consist of (i)
his acquisition of the principle that objects
have labels; (ii) a general learning mecha-
nism, namely learning by exclusion (emer-
gent matching) (19); and (iii) the ability to
store that knowledge in memory. There-
fore, our results strongly support the view
that a seemingly complex linguistic skill
previously described only in human chil-
dren may be mediated by simpler cognitive
building blocks that are also present in
another species. Whether Rico’s ability to
form a link between a label and an object is
homologous to children’s knowledge about
the names of things remains a matter for
further investigation. Clearly, from early
on, toddlers have a much broader knowl-
edge than Rico about the meaning of words,
and they can distinguish between different
functions of words such as verbs, adjec-
tives, and proper nouns. Moreover, children
are able to use their newly acquired knowl-
edge productively; that is, they are able to
say the words whose meaning they have
identified through fast mapping. Nonethe-
less, our findings corroborate the assump-
tion that listeners’ ability to attach meaning
to specific sounds evolved much earlier
than, and independently from, a flexible
production of specific sound patterns (20).
That is, some of the perceptual and cogni-
tive mechanisms that may mediate the com-
prehension of speech were already in place
before early humans began to talk (21, 22).
References and Notes
1. P. Bloom, How Children Learn the Meanings of Words
(MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000).
2. D. A. Baldwin, Dev. Psychol. 29, 832 (1993).
3. C. B. Mervis, J. Bertrand, Child Dev. 65, 1662 (1994).
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9. Further details on materials and methods and a video
clip demonstrating Rico’s performance during a trial
are available on Science Online.
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20. J. Fischer, Anim. Behav. 67, 655 (2004).
21. M. D. Hauser, N. Chomsky, W. T. Fitch, Science 298,
1569 (2002).
22. T. J. Bergmann, J. C. Beehner, D. L. Cheney, R. M.
Seyfarth, Science 302, 1234 (2003).
23. We thank S. Baus and her family for allowing us to
study Rico and for her enthusiastic participation in
this study. R. Mundry gave statistical advice, and C.
Teufel, M. Hauser, and three anonymous reviewers
provided valuable comments on the manuscript.
Funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to
J.F. (grant Fi707/4) is gratefully acknowledged.
Supporting Online Material
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5677/1682/
DC1
Materials and Methods
Movie S1
15 March 2004; accepted 26 April 2004
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A Simple Reason for a Big Difference: Wolves Do not Look Back at Humans, but Dogs Do
Article
  • Apr 2003
  • CURR BIOL
The present investigations were undertaken to compare interspecific communicative abilities of dogs and wolves, which were socialized to humans at comparable levels. The first study demonstrated that socialized wolves were able to locate the place of hidden food indicated by the touching and, to some extent, pointing cues provided by the familiar human experimenter, but their performance remained inferior to that of dogs. In the second study, we have found that, after undergoing training to solve a simple manipulation task, dogs that are faced with an insoluble version of the same problem look/gaze at the human, while socialized wolves do not. Based on these observations, we suggest that the key difference between dog and wolf behavior is the dogs' ability to look at the human's face. Since looking behavior has an important function in initializing and maintaining communicative interaction in human communication systems, we suppose that by positive feedback processes (both evolutionary and ontogenetically) the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has lead to complex forms of dog-human communication that cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialization.
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How Children Learn the Meaning of Words
Book
  • Feb 2000
How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind. According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways. This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field. Bradford Books imprint
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California Sea Lions Are Capable of Semantic Comprehension
Article
  • Jan 1984
Two California sea lions ( Zalophus californianus) were trained in a symbolic matching paradigm. Gestural signs produced by movements of the trainer's arms and hands referred to types of objects, modifiers, and actions. Both Ss were eventually trained with 3-sign constructions consisting of Modifier + Object + Action, in that order. Modifiers consisted of size and color attributes or of different locations of the objects. After 24 mo of training, 1 S had a comprehension vocabulary of 20 signs, while the other S achieved a comprehension vocabulary of 16 signs after 20 mo. Semantic comprehension was considered to be demonstrated if the S could follow directions when each sign was contrasted with every other in a series of commands. Currently, the Ss' semantic comprehension consists of 64 and 190 3-sign combinations, respectively. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Emergence of individual recognition in young macaques
Article
  • Apr 2004
Few studies have addressed the development of nonhuman primate infants' responses to conspecific vocalizations. Previous studies showed that the appropriate response to alarm, intergroup and long-distance contact calls emerged at about 6 months of age. It remained unclear whether this age constitutes a watershed in terms of infants' sociocognitive development or whether it was due to the types of stimuli used in the experiments. I therefore examined the development of infant Barbary macaque, Macaca sylvanus, responses to maternal calls, under the assumption that recognition of the mother is one of the tasks that infants should master as early as possible. I presented infants of different age categories with short bouts of screams recorded from their mothers or another female of the same social group. Experiments on yearlings confirmed the suitability of the experimental approach: yearlings responded significantly more strongly to maternal calls than to calls from unrelated females. Infants were tested at 4, 10 and 16 weeks of age. In the youngest age group, they failed to respond to the playbacks, whereas from 10 weeks of age on they responded significantly more strongly to maternal calls, suggesting that by this age they recognized their mothers by voice. These results suggest that the developmental trajectories in the domain of comprehension learning may be flexible, in the sense that infant responses may depend on the salience of, and the exposure to, the call type under study. The experiments also show that screams may transmit individual-specific characteristics that are perceptually salient to the listeners.
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Verbal commands as discriminative stimuli in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)
Article
  • Oct 1991
  • APPL ANIM BEHAV SCI
Domestic canids now have more uses than as pets and hunting partners. For example, humans have found them useful in the detection of drugs, as companions (e.g. those used in therapy for the mentally handicapped), and as aids to the physically handicapped. In this study, three dogs were used as subjects in five separate experimental tasks to test the abilities of these animals for increased usefulness as service dogs for the handicapped. The tasks included retrieving a particular wooden object in a three-choice situation as requested by the handler, locating the same objects at varying heights, retrieving the objects from behind a barrier, retrieving the objects when replaced by plastic ones, and returning to the handler without an object when the requested item was missing from a group of three presented objects.All three subjects were able to complete all five experimental tasks at a correct performance level of 83% or above (range 83–92%). In addition, their performances were comparable to those which have been studied in other (non-human) species. Thus, in this study, the dogs showed that it may be possible for humans to increase the difficulty of tasks required and, hence, the usefulness of domestic dogs as aids to the handicapped.
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