Supplementary methods and data for: Dogs with a vocabulary of object label remember labels for at ‎least two years

Long-term memory of words has a crucial role in the developing abilities of young children to acquire language. In dogs, the ability to learn object labels is present in only a small group of uniquely Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs. The ability of these dogs to acquire large vocabularies consisting of hundreds of names of dog toys through naturally occurring interactions in human families presents them as a valid model for studying language-related cognitive mechanisms. As they are very rare, little is known about the mechanisms through which they acquire such large vocabularies. In the current study, we tested the ability of five GWL dogs to retrieve 12 labelled objects two years after the object-label mapping acquisition. The dogs proved to remember the labels of between 3-9 objects. The results shed light on the process by which GWL dogs acquire an exceptionally large vocabulary of object names. As memory plays a crucial role in language development, these dogs supply a unique opport..., Subjects: 5 dogs participated in this study (2 females, all Border collies). These dogs all proved to possess a vocabulary of object labels (Fugazza et al., 2021). The owners reported that their dogs learned the labels through naturally occurring play interactions. During these play interactions, the owners would introduce a toy to the dog by saying the toy's name, and then allow the dog to fetch the toy and pull on it several times, while they repeatedly say the name. An example of such a teaching process is available on this link. All of these dogs participated in a study conducted in 2020 (Dror et al., 2021).
The toy names learning procedure conducted as part of Dror et al., (2021): In December 2020, each dog owner received a box containing 12 toys. On a predetermined date, the owners were instructed to open the box and from that day on, they had one week to teach their dogs the name of the 12 toys. The owners were given the freedom to teach the dogs the names of the toys in any way ..., , # Supplementary methods and data for: Dogs with a vocabulary of object label remember labels for at ‎least two years

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tmpg4f568](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tmpg4f568)

This dataset contains one Excel file with three sheets. The first sheet \"Legend\" contains information about the contents of the other two sheets.

### Sheet: \"2\_year\_test\"

This sheet presents the data collected two years after the dogs had last been exposed to the objects.

This data was used for the analysis presented in the article \"Dogs with a vocabulary of object label can remember labels for at ‎least two years\" (Dror et al., 2024)

### Sheet: \"1\_and\_2\_months\_tests\"

This sheet presents the data collected one and two months after the dogs had last been exposed to the objects.

This data was First published by Dror et al., 2021, and has been used again for the comparison conducted by Dror et al., 2024.

### The labels of the columns in the data sheets

| **Test date** ...