Dogs learn new words by eavesdropping on their owners

By Stephen Beech

Some dogs learn new words by eavesdropping on their owners, reveals new research.

Clever canines that have a unique talent for learning a vocabulary of toy names can pick up new words by simply overhearing their handlers’ conversations, say scientists.

Parents and dog owners know that some words should not be spoken, but only spelled, to prevent small ears from eavesdropping on the conversation.

Previous research has shown that, at the age of 18 months, toddlers can already learn new words by overhearing other people.

Now a ground-breaking study, published in the journal Science, reveals that a special group of dogs are also able to learn names for objects just by overhearing their owners’ interactions.

Similarly to 18-month-old toddlers that are equally good in learning from overheard speech and from direct interactions, scientists say gifted dogs also excel in learning from both situations

Although dogs excel at learning actions such as “sit” or “down”, the research team explained that only a very small group of canines have shown the ability to learn object names.

Dubbed Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs, they can quickly learn hundreds of toy names through natural play sessions with their owners.

Toddlers can easily learn new words through a range of different processes.

One of those processes is learning from overheard speech, where child learns new words by passively listening to interactions between adults.

To do so, children must monitor the speakers’ gaze and attention, detect communicative cues, and extract the target words from a continuous stream of speech.

Until now, it wasn't known whether GWL dogs could also learn new object labels when not directly addressed.

Study lead scientist Dr. Shany Dror, of Eötvös Loránd (ELTE) University in Budapest, Hungary, said: “Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human.

“Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviours strikingly similar to those of young children.”

In an experiment, the research team tested 10 gifted dogs in two situations. In the first, owners introduced two new toys and repeatedly labelled them while interacting directly with the dog.

In the second, the dogs passively watched as 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 only eight minutes, distributed across several brief 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 dog’s performance was very accurate already at the first trials of the test, with 80% correct choices in the addressed condition and 100% in the overhearing condition.

Overall, the gifted dogs performed just as well when learning from overheard speech, as when they were directly taught, mirroring findings from studies of toddlers.

Gifted dogs also overcame one of the key challenges in learning labels.

In a second experiment, the researchers introduced a new challenge where 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.

The research team explained that it created a temporal separation between seeing the object and hearing its name.

Despite the discontinuity, most of the gifted dogs successfully learned the new labels.

Senior scientist Dr. Claudia Fugazza, also of ELTE, said: “These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels."

She says the study suggests that the ability to learn from overheard speech may rely on general "socio-cognitive mechanisms" shared across species, rather than being uniquely tied to human language.

But the researchers emphasised that GWL dogs are extremely rare, and their "remarkable" abilities likely reflect a combination of individual predispositions and unique life experiences.

Dr. Dror added: “These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language.

“But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way - far from it.”

The study was part of the Genius Dog Challenge research project which aims to understand the unique talent that Gifted Word Learner dogs have.

The researchers encourage dog owners who believe their dogs know multiple toy names, to contact them.