Miso, a 6-year-old male border collie from Canada, knows the names of about 200 toys. Photo / Washington Post
In many households, it’s a forbidden four-letter word. It can’t be uttered aloud, only spelled, so those within earshot don’t get too worked up.
“Can you take the dog for a W-A-L-K?”
Many dog owners know their pets excel at learning words such as “walk”, “sit”, “stay” and even their own names. But researchers have discovered the word-acquisition ability of certain canines can rival that of toddlers.
A study published in the journal Science on Thursday found that some dogs can learn words simply by overhearing conversations, even when the pets are not directly addressed, an ability humans begin to acquire at about 18 months old.
“This can really give us more appreciation to how exceptional dogs can be,” said lead author Shany Dror, a comparative cognition researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
For their experiments, Dror and her team recruited 10 dogs and their owners from around the world. The breeds included a miniature Australian shepherd, a German shepherd, a labrador retriever and several border collies – all herding or sporting breeds known for their trainability.
Dogs tend to be better at learning words for actions – think “fetch” or “roll over” – than at retaining the names of objects. So Dror sought out what she called “gifted” dogs that had previously demonstrated an ability to learn the names of their toys.
A study in @SciReports highlights characteristics that are shared among most Gifted Word Learner dogs, including learning speed, their large vocabulary, and that they learned the names of toys spontaneously, without the explicit intent of their owners. https://t.co/1lbezfFzO3 pic.twitter.com/nMTJzavlox
— Nature Portfolio (@NaturePortfolio) December 22, 2023
Basket, a 7-year-old border collie in New York, was among them.
“I noticed she started to actually know the names of her toys without me giving her assistance when she was about 8 months old,” said one of her owners, Elle Baumgartel-Austin.
The researchers instructed the dog owners to discuss two toys that their dogs had never seen before. The dogs were present for those conversations. But the owners never directly addressed their pets.
“It was very funny watching the video after the fact, just to see what she was doing,” Baumgartel-Austin said. Basket had followed the toy with her eyes as they talked. “She got a little frustrated. It was not very fun to see two humans play with a toy that she wanted.”
To assess what the dogs learned by eavesdropping, a day or more later the owners were guided to place the toys in a different room among other plushies and then ask their dog to retrieve one of the two new toys by name. Seven of the 10 dogs, including Basket, regularly fetched the correct toy. Although the sample size was small, the results were statistically significant.
The discovery not only reveals a previously unknown cognitive ability of canines, but it could also offer clues to how human language may have evolved.
Overhearing the conversations of parents and other adults is part of how toddlers learn to talk. That some dogs are able to do so as well suggests that an ability to read social cues needed to follow a conversation predates language itself.
“This is something that came before language,” Dror said. “Because dogs don’t have language, and yet they do have these abilities.”
Gabriella Lakatos, a researcher at Britain’s University of Hertfordshire who also has studied human-dog interactions, said the findings “extend the list of behaviours and abilities previously described in dogs as analogous to those of young children”.
Among other animals, the ability to eavesdrop has also been documented in bonobos. Canine researchers have known since the early 2000s that some dogs can recognise more than 200 items by name and can even infer the names of new toys by excluding ones they already know.
But Juliane Kaminski, a comparative psychology associate professor at Britain’s University of Portsmouth who conducted that early research, cautioned against overinterpreting the results to say dogs can deeply learn language the same way people do. “The interpretation in terms of ‘word learning’ in the linguistic sense seems a little too strong for me,” she said. “What the study shows is that dogs can learn labels without being explicitly directed toward” an object.
She added it is still unclear why only a handful of dogs are able to learn the names of their toys. Her own work with label-learning dogs suggests they are more curious and focused than their less-gifted canine counterparts.
“However, what we do not know is what comes first,” Kaminski said. Are some dogs born better learners? Or do they simply get used to fetching objects when asked?
“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, and we need further research to explore this,” she said.
Dror tried for years in vain to train other less gifted but still very good dogs – including her own German shepherd, Mitos – to associate names with toys. “Nothing worked. It was very frustrating.”
Still, Mitos nuzzled his way into the new paper. He died last year at 15, just as Dror was submitting the research for publication, and she dedicated the paper to him. “It’s definitely hard to lose someone that’s been such a huge part of your life for so long,” she said.
Now, Dror has a new puppy – a schipperke named Flea. She is introducing her to toys and hoping she can learn.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.