Scientists indicate that intelligent dogs with the ability to learn vocabulary can acquire new words simply by listening to their trainers’ conversations.
Dog parents and owners know that there are some words that should not be pronounced, but only spelled, to prevent little ears from overhearing the conversation. Previous research has shown that by 18 months of age, toddlers can already learn new words by listening to other people.
Currently, a groundbreaking study published in the journal Science shows that a special group of dogs is also capable of learning names of objects simply by listening to their owners’ interactions.
Similar to 18-month-olds, scientists say gifted dogs also excel at learning from direct and indirect speech situations.
Although dogs are excellent at learning actions like “sit” or “lie down,” the research team explained that only a very small group of canines have demonstrated the ability to learn names of objects.
Known as gifted word learners (GWL) dogs, they can quickly learn hundreds of toy names through natural play sessions with their owners. Until now, it was not known whether GWL dogs could also learn new object labels when not spoken to directly.
Children can do this, but they must monitor the speakers’ gaze and attention, detect communicative cues, and extract target words from a continuous stream of speech.
“Our findings show that the social-cognitive processes that enable word learning from indirect speech are not uniquely human,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Shany Dror. “Under the right conditions, some dogs exhibit behaviors surprisingly similar to those of young children.”
In one experiment, the research team tested 10 gifted dogs in two situations. In the first, owners presented two new toys and labeled them repeatedly while interacting directly with the dog.
In the second, the dogs passively watched while their owners talked to another person about the toys, without addressing the dog at all. Overall, in each situation, the dogs heard the name of each new toy for a total of just eight minutes, spread over several short 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. The dogs’ performance was very accurate already in the first trials of the test, with 80% correct choices in the directed condition and 100% in the passive listening condition.
In general, gifted dogs performed just as well when learning from indirect speech as they did when taught directly, mirroring findings from studies of young children.
In a second experiment, the researchers introduced a new challenge where the 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.
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The research team explained that this created a temporal separation between seeing the object and hearing its name. Despite the discontinuity, most gifted dogs successfully found the named toy.
The authors suggest that the ability to learn from indirect speech may depend on general “socio-cognitive” mechanisms shared between species, rather than being solely linked to human language.
But the researchers stressed that GWL dogs are extremely rare, and their “remarkable” abilities likely reflect a combination of individual predispositions and unique life experiences.
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Dr. Dror added that dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that allowed humans to develop language.
“But we’re not suggesting that all dogs learn this way, far from it,” he said.
Researchers encourage dog owners who believe their dogs know multiple toy names to contact them in the Genius Dog Challenge research project at ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary.
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