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Your Dog Might Be Smarter Than You Think: “Gifted” Canines Learning Words Just by Listening In
It turns out some dogs are secret eavesdroppers, picking up new words and toy names just by listening to human conversations – a feat previously thought to be exclusive to human toddlers.
If you’ve ever had to resort to spelling out words like “W-A-L-K” or “T-R-E-A-T” to avoid sending your furry friend into a frenzy, you already know that dogs pay attention to our chatter. But a groundbreaking new study reveals that some particularly bright canines can do more than just recognize a few keywords; they can actually learn the name of an unfamiliar toy simply by overhearing a brief interaction between two people.
What’s even more astonishing is that these “gifted” dogs can learn a new toy’s name even if it’s out of sight when they first hear the word. The key?
Their favorite human looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. This fascinating discovery was published in the journal Science.
“What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They’re using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about,” explains cognitive scientist Shany Dror, from Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.
Dror suggests this ability offers a glimpse into human evolution. “This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language,” she says, “and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities.”
Fetch the Armadillo!
Pinpointing exactly how many words a dog knows can be tricky. Often, commands are accompanied by specific tones of voice or hand gestures, making it hard to tell if the dog is responding to the word itself or other cues. While most dogs learn that “fetch” means to bring something, differentiating between “fetch the ball” and “fetch the frisbee” is a challenge for many.
“There’s only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects,” Dror states. “It’s quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it.”
For years, Dror and her colleagues have been on the hunt for these rare, word-savvy canines, attracting considerable media attention. (If your dog knows the names of five or more objects, they’d love to hear from you!) While many are working breeds, especially Border collies, other breeds like Pekingese and mixed breeds have also shown this remarkable talent.
“Normally, the owners contact us and tell us, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about your study,'” Dror says. She notes that these owners typically didn’t set out to teach their dogs extensive vocabularies.
“It’s just they play with the dog, they give the dog a toy, and then one day they notice the dog knows the name of the toy and they start adding more and more toys.” Each toy gets its own unique name, which the dogs quickly pick up.
Dror even recounted a story of an owner who avoided counting her dog’s toys so her husband wouldn’t know the true number!
To delve into how these dogs acquire new words, Dror and her team conducted an experiment. Two people would interact while a “gifted” dog observed.
One person would show the other a brand new toy and discuss it, embedding the toy’s name into sentences – for example, “This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet.
It has a tail, like an armadillo tail.”
Despite the language not being directed at the dogs, these super-learners registered the new toy’s name. Later, when asked, they were able to pick it out of a pile in a separate room, without any human hints. Dror, watching from another room, was genuinely surprised by their confidence.
“Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they’re supposed to do,” she recalls. “Their performance was really, really high.”
Regular Pups vs. Super Studiers
The researchers then wondered if seeing the toy while hearing its name was crucial, even if the words weren’t aimed at the dog. So, they designed another experiment that introduced a delay.
Dogs saw an unfamiliar toy, then the owner dropped it into a bucket, out of sight. The owner then talked to the dog, mentioning the toy’s name while glancing at the bucket.
While more challenging, the dogs still managed to use this information to learn the toy’s name and retrieve it later. “This shows us how flexible they are able to learn,” Dror comments. “They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions.”
However, it’s important to remember that these were exceptionally gifted dogs, as noted by Rochelle Newman, a language scientist at the University of Maryland. “They did do a study with regular pet dogs and they didn’t find anything there,” she points out, meaning it’s unclear what an average pet dog can glean from overhearing human speech.
Newman also highlights that the overheard conversations in the experiment weren’t drastically different from the “dog talk” people often use, just directed at a person near the dog instead. This differs from the typical, intricate conversations people have at home.
“That said, this is still an impressive learning ability,” Newman concedes. She finds dogs’ language abilities fascinating because they share so much of our lives and can pick up linguistic elements without explicit training.
“I think one of the things that we don’t yet understand is all the factors that make one object deserving of a different name to a dog,” Newman muses, suggesting that a ball fitting in a dog’s mouth might seem fundamentally different from one that doesn’t.
Ultimately, this research, Dror adds, is about understanding how humans evolved their unparalleled language abilities. “One of the ways that we can understand that,” she says, “is by looking at our closest friends.” So, next time you’re chatting with a friend, remember, your dog might just be taking notes!