A recent study carried out by researchers from the University of Lincoln has revealed that while a baby if asked to identify a ball would look for a spherical-shaped thing, a dog does not do the same. He would rather look at the texture of an object along with its size so as to identify the same.

The study published in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE has been claiming that a dog does not relate an object to a word as a human child does. The study was focused on identifying if a dog has a human-like "shape bias".

It is probably the reason why Gable, a five-year-old border collie, was selected for the study. Border collies are excellent at word association. The study also had Chaser, another dog, who knew the names of over 1,000 objects, and Rico, nine-year-old, who had the ability to understand 200 words. He could fetch the objects after hearing their name.

It was seen that Gable got 43 out of 54 objects when heard their names. Another study that used foam swimming board objects found that training enabled Gable to associate word to objects of same texture and not shape. "This study shows that there is a qualitative difference in word comprehension in the dog compared to humans", said Dr. Emile van der Zee.