A new study has discovered that dogs can learn names of new objects just by listening to their owners interact with each other.
Dogs are renowned for their remarkable ability to learn human language via training—now a new groundbreaking study has just revealed that some are even smarter than that. Published in the journal Science, the study found that a special group of dogs known as Gifted Word Learners are not only able to pick up words from direct interaction, but can also learn names of objects by just overhearing their owners talking with each other.
Similarly to 1.5-year-old toddlers, these dogs can learn new words by passively listening to interactions between humans who are not directly addressing them. Miso, a 6-year-old male border collie from Canada, that knows the names of about 200 toys. The study observed that, to do this, children monitor speakers’ gaze and attention, detect communicative cues and extract the target words from a continuous stream of speech. Until now, it was unknown whether gifted 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,” said paper author Shany Dror, from the Eötvös Loránd University and VetMedUni universities in a statement. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.” Squall, a 9.5-year-old male border collie from the US that participated in the study and knows the names of many, many dog toys. Scientists tested ten GWL dogs in two different situations, addressing condition, where owners introduced new toys and labeled them while interacting directly with the dog; and overheard condition, where dogs passively watched as their owners talked to another person about the toys, without addressing the dog at all. In total, the dogs heard the name of the new toy for only eight minutes each condition, distributed across several brief exposure sessions. The toys were then placed in a different room, while the owners asked the dogs to retrieve each toy by name, and in both conditions, seven out of ten dogs learned the new labels. Augie, a 5.5-year-old Labrador from Texas, that participated in the study. The dogs’ performances were even more accurate in the overhearing condition with 100 percent right choices compared to the 80 percent in the addressed condition. But that’s not all. 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, and despite this discontinuity, most of the gifted dogs successfully managed to learn the new labels. “These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels” said paper author and ELTE ethologist Claudia Fugazza in a statement. Bryn, an 11-year-old male Border Collie from the UK, that knows the names of about 100 toys. Gifted Word Learners are extremely rare, and their remarkable abilities likely reflect a combination of individual predispositions as well as unique life experiences. “These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language” said Dror. “But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.” Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about gifted dogs? Let us know via science@newsweek.com. Reference Dror, S., Miklósi, Á., Morvai, B., Năstase, A.-S., & Fugazza, C. . Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants. Science, 371, 160–163. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq5474
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