Rico the dog ‘has learning ability of three-year-old’

A BORDER Collie called Rico has a ‘vocabulary’ of 200 words and has astounded researchers by showing he can learn new words as well as a three-year-old human child.

The nine-year-old dog, who belongs to a German family, is also able to learn the names of unfamiliar toys in one go, using a process of deciphering meaning employed by human children.

Rico’s amazing talents were demonstrated in experiments carried out by psychologists from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

The scientists are now investigating whether Rico can understand whole phrases, such as “put the toy in the box”.

According to his owners, he can.

First, the researchers tested Rico’s vocabulary. In a series of controlled experiments, he correctly retrieved 37 out of 40 items from his toy collection, recognising each one when its name was called.

The scientists estimated that Rico’s vocabulary size was comparable with that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea lions and parrots.

Next the researchers assessed Rico’s ability to learn new words.

A new toy was placed among seven familiar toys, and in a separate room the owner asked Rico to fetch it using a name the dog had never heard before.

In seven out of 10 sessions, Rico correctly selected the unfamiliar toy. He apparently appreciated, as children do, that new words tend to refer to objects that do not already have names.

The researchers, led by Julia Fischer, wrote in the journal Science: “This retrieval rate is comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers..

“These experiments demonstrate Rico reliably associates arbitrary acoustic patterns (human words) with specific items in his environment.”

US expert Paul Bloom, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, suggested that chimps could now be upstaged by dogs.