Fast mapping and understanding of social reference in a domestic dog

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’. While this ability was long believed to be restricted to humans, this question had effectively not been addressed in animals. This talk will present a study designed to examine how a border collie, Rico, who knew the labels of over 200 different items, came to acquire the referent of a novel word. The experiments showed that Rico was able to infer the names of novel items by exclusion learning, and that he correctly retrieved these items right away and four 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 special to humans. However, critics pointed out that this study does not demonstrate that Rico understands that words indeed refer to objects. Hence, a second study was initiated in which reference was pitted against temporal contiguity. The results provide mixed evidence: in a first set of experiments, Rico’s preference for a given toy overrode his attention to the speaker’s focus. When his preference was assessed post hoc, he retrieved the toy that the owner had actively attended to while she labeled it significantly more frequently, but the time span between presentation and retrieval strongly affected his performance. The implications of both of the above findings for our understanding of the evolution of speech will be discussed.