Gifted Dogs Generalize Words to Items With the Same Function

Key points

This study was carried out in a natural setup, with the human families where the dogs live.

Studying dogs can help us understand how word learning and categorization may have evolved across species.

The research highlights just how attentive and cognitively flexible dogs can be.

This post is in response to What Makes a Dog a Gifted Word Learner? By Marc Bekoff Ph.D.

Dogs are amazing intelligent and emotional beings, and I'm always looking for new research that aims to extend what we know in these areas. I recently learned of such a study titled "Dogs Extend Verbal Labels for Functional Classification of Objects" by dog experts Drs. Claudia Fugazza, Andrea Sommese, and Ádam Miklosi, and I'm pleased that Claudia could answer a few questions about this seminal work. 1