ArticleScientific reports2023
A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Popperian Dogs-Practical Rationality and Inferential Reasoning in Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Toy exploration in gifted word learner dogs and typical dogs.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Sound quality impacts dogs' ability to recognize and respond to playback words.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Soundboard-trained dogs produce non-accidental, non-random and non-imitative two-button combinations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Shape and texture biases in dogs' generalization of trained objects.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years.Biology letters · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Dogs that have a vocabulary of object labels (Gifted Word Learner dogs-GWL dogs) have great potential as a comparative model for studying a variety of cognitive mechanisms. However, only a handful of studies, with a small sample size of 1 or 2 dogs, have examined this phenomenon. GWL dogs appear to share many of the same distinctive characteristics, but due to their rarity, it is not clear if these similarities are only anecdotal or indeed reflect characteristics that are similar in these rare individuals. Here we present the first study conducted on a relatively large sample of 41 GWL dogs that were recruited and tested using a citizen science model. After testing the dogs' receptive vocabulary of toy names, we asked the owners to complete a questionnaire about their and their dog's life experiences. Our findings highlight several characteristics that are shared among most GWL dogs, such as their learning speed, their large vocabulary, and that they learned the names of the toys spontaneously, without the explicit intent of their owners. Our findings validate previous anecdotal evidence on common characteristics of GWL dogs and supply additional support to the hypothesis that these dogs represent a unique group of dogs.
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