Unlike well-trained dogs that are able to distinguish (辨别) between common orders like “sit” and “stay”, some “Gifted Word Learner” dogs can associate objects with words.

One year ago, Shany Dror and her colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary discovered that some dogs have an obviously excellent natural ability to acquire object names. To study this further — how many words they can learn in a certain period of time and whether they can still remember the words after an extended period — they looked for more “Gifted Word Learner” dogs online and, in the end, they found six qualified dogs.

The researchers sent each dog’s owner six new toys. Owners then had six days to teach their dogs the names of the toys with their usual methods. These generally involved playing with the dog and each toy, often for just half an hour a day. At the end of the six-day learning period, the research team used online video conferencing to test the dogs’ abilities to pick out each toy by name from a number of old and new toys. Each owner sat with their dog in one room and told them to fetch a given toy from a second room. All the dogs successfully brought back at least five of the six new toys. The team then sent another 12 new toys and repeated the process. All the dogs successfully brought back at least 11 of the toys.

Afterwards, half the new toys were stored for one month, and the other half for two months, and the dogs were tested again after each storage period. Five of the dogs remembered all the toy names after one month, and four dogs remembered all or almost all of them after two months.

Dror says these dogs which are raised in the home like human children, provide an excellent animal model (模式) for studying the way humans acquire language. An animal model offers a basis of comparison for understanding which language-learning skills are specific to humans, and which aren’t. “We want to understand what makes humans different,” says Dror.

【小题1】What is the research mainly about?

A．Dogs’ daily behaviors.

B．Dog training methods.

C．Dog-human relationship.

D．Dogs’ learning ability.

【小题2】What is the reason the six dogs were chosen for the research?

A．Their talent for learning object names.

B．Their ability to recognize human voice.

C．Their tendency to follow human orders.

D．Their intelligence to interact with human.

【小题3】The six dogs learned the toy names through ________.

A．video games

B．continuous training

C．counting toys

D．playing outdoors