"Honey, will you take Luna to the P-A-R-K?" both parents and dog owners know that some words should not be spoken, but only spelled, to prevent small ears from eavesdropping on the conversation. At the age of 1.5 years toddlers can already learn new words by overhearing other people. Now, a groundbreaking study published in Science reveals that a special group of dogs are also able to learn names for objects by overhearing their owners' interactions.
Similarly to 1.5 -year-old toddlers, that are equally good in learning from overheard speech and from direct interactions, these gifted dogs also excel in
learning from both situations
What makes this discovery remarkable
Although dogs excel at learning actions like "sit" or "down", only a very small group of dogs have shown the ability to learn object names. These Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs can quickly learn hundreds of toy names through natural play sessions with their owners. Toddlers can easily learn new words through a variety of different processes. One of these processes is learning from overheard speech, where child learns new words by passively listening to interactions between adults. To do this, children must monitor the speakers' gaze and attention, detect communicative cues, and extract the target words from a continuous stream of speech. Until now, it was unknown whether GWL dogs could also learn new object labels when not directly addressed.
"Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human," says lead scientist Dr. Shany Dror, from ELTE and VetMedUni universities. "Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children."
How the researchers found that Gifted dogs learn toy names by eavesdropping
In the first experiment, the research team tested 10 Gifted dogs in two situations:
1. Addressed condition: Owners introduced two new toys and repeatedly labeled them while interacting directly with the dog.
2. Overheard condition: The dogs passively watched as their owners talked to another person about the toys, without addressing the dog at all.
Overall, in each condition, the dogs heard the name of each new toy for a total of only eight minutes, distributed across several brief exposure sessions. To test whether the dogs had learned the new labels, the toys were placed in a different room, and the owners asked the dogs to retrieve each toy by name (e.g., "Can you bring Teddy?")
The result: In both conditions, seven out of ten dogs learned the new labels
The dog's performance was very accurate already at the first trials of the test, with 80% correct choices in the addressed condition and 100% in the overhearing condition. Overall, the Gifted dogs performed just as well when learning from overheard speech, as when they were directly
taught, mirroring findings from infant studies.
But that's not all: Gifted dogs overcome one of the key challenges in learning labels
In a second experiment, the researchers introduced a new challenge: owners first showed the dogs the toys and then placed them inside a bucket, naming the toys only when they were out of the dogs' sight. This created a temporal separation between seeing the object and hearing its name. Despite this discontinuity, most of the Gifted dogs successfully learned the new labels.
"These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels" says senior scientist Dr. Claudia Fugazza, from ELTE University in Budapest.
What we can learn from this study
The study suggests that the ability to learn from overheard speech may rely on general socio- cognitive mechanisms shared across species, rather than being uniquely tied to human language.
However, Gifted Word Learners are extremely rare, and their remarkable abilities likely reflect a combination of individual predispositions and unique life experiences.
"These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language" says Dr. Shany Dror "But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way - far from it."
Is your dog a Gifted Word Learner dog?
This research is part of the Genius Dog Challenge research project
