Just like with toddlers, it’s often better to spell out certain words when a dog is nearby. Saying words “park” or “walk” can make the family pet excited the way that the mere mention of a “cookie” will for a young child. By the age of one-and-a-half, toddlers learn new words by listening to other people. And, it turns out, some dogs can also learn by eavesdropping. According to a small study published today in the journal Science, Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs can learn the names for various objects by listening to their owners’ interactions,
Learning words
GWL is a fairly new distinction by scientists for dogs that are considered uniquely gifted for their ability to learn the names of various objects. Previous studies have found that these smart canines can categorize objects by function and understand how similar types of toys work, even if the toys don’t look alike. Being a GWL dog is not unique to any particular breed, but border collies and border collie mixes retained a decent amount of words in a 2023 study.
Toddlers learn new words in many ways, including passively listening to interactions between adults. To do this, they must follow the speakers’ gaze and attention, spot communicative cues, and pick out the target words from a continuous stream of speech. Until now, it was not known if GWL dogs could also learn new object labels when not directly addressed.
Addressing vs. eavesdropping
To learn more, a team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary’s Genius Dog Challenge research project tested 10 gifted dogs in two situations.
The first situation was called an addressed condition, where owners introduced two new toys and repeatedly labeled them while interacting directly with the dog.
Addressed condition
The second was an overheard condition, where the dogs sat nearby as their owners spoke with another person about the toys and did not address the dogs.
Overhearing test
During each condition, the dogs heard the name of the new toys for a total of eight minutes over several short exposure sessions. To see if the dogs had learned the new labels, the toys were then placed in a different room. The owners asked the dogs to retrieve each toy by name. For example, an owner would ask a dog “Can you bring Teddy?” and the dog’s actions were recorded.
In both conditions, seven out of the 10 dogs learned the new labels. The dog’s performance was also very accurate. During the addressed condition, the choices were correct 80 percent of the time. During the overhearing condition (when the dogs were not directly addressed) they were correct 100 percent of the time. Overall, the GWL dogs performed just as well when learning from speech they overheard as when they were directly taught.
“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” Dr. Shany Dror, a study co-author and cognitive researcher and animal trainer, said in a statement. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.”
Matters of time
During a second experiment, the team also found that GWL dogs can overcome one of the key challenges in learning labels. In the experiment called a discontinuity condition, dog owners first showed the dogs the toys and then put the objects inside of a bucket. They only named the toys when they were out of the dogs’ sight. For the dogs, this created a time delay between actually seeing the object and then hearing its name. Despite this, most of the dogs successfully learned the new labels.
Discontinuity condition
“These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels,” added study co-author and ethnologist Dr. Claudia Fugazza.
According to the team, these findings suggest a dog’s ability to learn from overheard speech may rely on brain mechanisms shared across species, instead of being tied to human language. However, since GWL dogs are extremely rare, their abilities likely reflect a combination of nature and nurture.
“These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language,” Dror concluded. “But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.”
If you suspect that your dog knows multiple toy names and could be a GWL dog, researchers from the Genius Dog Challenge research project encourage dog owners to contact them by email (geniusdogchallenge.offcial@gmail.com), Facebook, or Instagram.
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