Seven of 10 specially gifted dogs correctly identified new toys after eavesdropping on their owners’ conversations with a third person — without any direct instruction — according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The animals, including a Border collie named Basket and a Labrador named Augie, listened as their owners held and discussed a new toy, then retrieved it from a pile of others in a separate room.
The findings add to growing evidence that a small subset of dogs possesses language-learning abilities previously documented only in parrots and apes, raising broader questions about animal cognition that researchers say are far from settled.
What the experiment showed
Researchers led by Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria recruited 10 dogs from a rare population of gifted word-learners — animals capable of retaining the names of hundreds of objects. Scientists have documented approximately 50 such dogs worldwide.
In the experiment, each dog watched its owner hold a new toy — a stuffed stingray or armadillo — and talk about the object to a second person in the room. The dog was then directed to retrieve that specific toy from a pile of others.
Seven of the 10 dogs succeeded. The animals also passed a harder version of the task: when owners placed the new toy inside an opaque box before discussing it, the dogs still learned the correct name, identifying the object by its label alone without ever seeing it.
“This is the first time that we see a specific group of dogs that are able to learn labels from overhearing interactions,” Dror said.
Where these dogs fit in animal cognition
Among non-human animals, only parrots and apes have previously demonstrated comparable eavesdropping-based word acquisition, according to the study. The capacity also appears in human children younger than 2, who pick up vocabulary from ambient speech without being directly taught.
But the mechanisms are not equivalent, Dror said. The gifted dogs in the study are fully grown adults, meaning the brain processes enabling them to eavesdrop are likely different from those at work in early human language development.
Heidi Lyn, an animal cognition expert at the University of South Alabama who was not involved in the research, said the results illustrate how “animals have a lot more going on cognitively than maybe you think they do.”
What remains unknown
Most dogs do not learn object names this way, and researchers are still working to determine what distinguishes gifted word-learners from other dogs. Dror said she plans to continue studying the animals to identify the specific cues they rely on when eavesdropping.