Some Dogs Can Learn New Words by Snooping in Our Conversations, Study Finds

Dogs might have more tricks up their furry sleeves than we knew, at least the smartest ones. Scientists have just found that some dogs’ cognitive skills can rival those of human toddlers.

Researchers in Budapest and elsewhere have been studying dogs especially gifted at learning and memorizing names for toys. In their latest study, they’ve shown these genius canines can pick up on new words by simply eavesdropping on their owners. The results indicate that humans aren’t the only ones able to learn from overheard speech, the researchers say.

“The current findings highlight the huge potential social cues have as a means of communicating with our dogs,” lead study author Shany Dror, an animal cognition researcher, told Gizmodo. “I hope that this is something that both dog owners and trainers will take into account in their day-to-day interactions with their dogs.”

Gifted word-learner dogs

Your average dog can easily be trained to associate human words with requested actions like “sit” or “stay.” But, according to Dror, only some dogs seem to be naturally adept at understanding and internalizing the connection between a specific word spoken by a person and the physical object it’s naming (usually a toy). The most talented of these canines, which the researchers have dubbed Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs, can learn the names of hundreds of dog toys while playing with their owners.

Basket is a 7-year-old female Border Collie who participated in the study. She’s said to know the names of over 200 dog toys. © Elle Baumgartel

For years, scientists at Eötvös Loránd (ELTE) University have been studying these dogs as part of a research project called the Genius Dog Challenge. Dror started contributing to the project while completing her PhD at ELTE, though she’s now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, in Austria.

The team’s previous research found that some GWL dogs can learn a new word with as few as four mentions of it (though without further reinforcing, they tend to forget quickly) and that they can retain the memory of a once-learned word for up to two years.

Dogs generally love to keep an ever-watchful eye over their owners. And the researchers wondered if GWL dogs could also learn new words just by paying close attention to their owners’ indirect cues. That’s a skill, studies have shown, that human babies tend to exhibit by the time they turn a year and a half.

Talented at overhearing

The researchers recruited ten gifted dogs and their owners for their experiments.

In the first phase of tests, they set up two conditions. In one, the dogs learned a new word as usual, with the owners repeatedly labeling an object in front of the dogs while playing with them. In the second, the dogs were still exposed to the object but only heard their owners label it through a conversation with another person. Two new toys were presented in each scenario. And the success of learning a new word was tested by placing the toy in a second room along with other toys and asking the dogs to bring it back to the owner (this setup ensured that the owners couldn’t influence the dogs’ choice).

The dogs had a high 80% accuracy rate when they were directly taught the new word. Even more remarkably, however, they had a 100% accuracy rate when they learned it by overhearing.

To up the ante, the researchers then conducted another set of experiments. This time, the dogs were shown the toy, but the owners only labeled it after the toy was placed out of sight in a bucket. Despite this temporal disconnect between seeing the object and hearing its name, the majority of gifted dogs were still able to correctly learn the new word.

“These findings mirror the findings from studies with 18-month-old children, which found that children at that age are equally good at learning from overheard speech and from direct interactions,” Dror explained.

The team’s work was published Thursday in the journal Science.

The mysteries of canine cognition

Dogs have evolved to become especially good at reading our cues, so it’s not altogether surprising that some can match the language-acquiring prowess of young children.

Dog owners frequently refer to their animal companions as “fur babies,” but the brains of these gifted dogs probably aren’t operating exactly as a toddler’s does when they overhear someone, the researchers note.

“When scientists talk about functional similarities, we mean that at the surface level, we see the same behavior in different species. However, behaviors that look similar may be powered by cognitive processes that are not the same,” said Dror. “So the fact that the dogs are showing a behavior that is similar to that of children does not mean that the thoughts that led them to perform these behaviors are the same. In fact, it’s more likely that the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these behaviors are different.”

Sadly, it appears that the talent for overhearing isn’t universal among dogkind. The researchers performed the same basic experiment with typical family dogs that had no prior experience of toy learning. After accounting for dogs’ natural curiosity and tendency to engage with new things, the average dogs didn’t perform any better than chance when asked to pick out the correct toy, the researchers found.

Still, just because most dogs aren’t certified word geniuses, that doesn’t mean they’re not capable of understanding us quite well. “We know from previous studies that dogs, as a species, present extraordinary social skills and can learn from their owners’ demonstrations of nonverbal tasks,” Dror noted.

The researchers plan to continue studying the complexities of gifted dogs and how they’re able to learn so much from their humans. And if you think your pooch might be gifted, you can reach out to the team for potential inclusion in future studies.