‘Gifted learner dogs’ can learn words by eavesdropping, study says | Animal behaviour

Whether it’s a piece of food or a four-letter swear word, young children can learn words from hearing adults – but researchers have found that some dogs can do something similar.

Scientists have discovered that dogs with the unusual ability to learn the names of myriad objects can detect such labels by listening to conversations.

The team says such abilities rely on a host of social cognitive skills, from identifying the relevant word in a conversation to using cues from people’s gaze, gestures and voices to understand what the word refers to.

“There are a lot of complex social things going on here and we don’t know if dogs do it in the same way as children,” said Dr. Shany Dror, first author of the research at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. “But on the surface we see that the result appears to be the same.”

Writing in the journal Science, the team describes how they made their discovery while working with dogs “gifted at learning words.”

In the first experiment, 10 of these dogs – including border collies, a Rescue border collie-mix and a Labrador – were each introduced to two new toys.

Each toy was presented to a dog for a period of 1 minute, with the name of the toy repeated, before the dog was allowed to play with it. This process was repeated several times over a series of days.

A second experiment was similar, but instead of introducing a new toy directly to the dog, family members passed it to each other using the dog’s name, ensuring they did not interact with their dog.

For each experiment, the team tested whether a dog had learned the names of its new toys by placing the objects in a room next to nine familiar toys. Its owner then asked the dog to retrieve a particular toy by name, performing 12 trials for new toys and 12 for old toys.

Taken as a group, the dogs chose the correct new toy when asked about 90% of the time if they had ever heard its name directly, compared to about 80% of the time if they had only heard its name before – a difference that is statistically negligible. Additionally, in both scenarios, the dogs did better than chance in choosing the correct new toy of the two.

“I think what’s exciting is what this tells us about these dogs’ ability to interpret our communication,” Dror said.

Another experiment suggested that dogs “good at word learning” could learn the name of a new toy even if it was only mentioned after the object was out of sight – a skill that children also demonstrate.

The team notes that the ability to learn labels from heard words has previously been discovered in bonobos raised in a language-enriched environment, with evidence of this skill in an African gray parrot. However, the new study found that typical family dogs don’t possess this skill.

Still, the researchers say their findings suggest that humans aren’t the only ones with the necessary social abilities.

“The fact that this skill also exists in a species that does not have language suggests that the skill itself predates language,” Dror said. “Humans therefore first developed an ability to understand complex social interactions and only later used this complex understanding to develop language.”

Professor Marilyn Vihman of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work, said it was still unclear why some dogs were “good at learning words.” But she said these dogs’ ability to pick up the shapes of words by hearing them was quite striking and seemed to match what 18-month-olds were often able to do.

“Since dogs are, as the authors note, very sensitive to the humans on whom they depend for survival, this does not seem surprising,” she said. But Vihman added that it’s also possible that researchers have already made too many assumptions about the social skills infants need to understand the shapes and meanings of words from heard speech. “Maybe just hearing a word repeatedly is enough for that word to be remembered, in some cases,” she said.