There are a few special words that will perk the ears of many a dog – “hungry”, “park” and of course, “T-R-E-A-T”.
But a choice group of gifted canines appear to have a remarkable capacity for learning human vocabulary, to the point that they acquire language by eavesdropping the way young toddlers do.
That’s according to a new study published on Thursday in the journal Science, which shows that some “gifted word learner” dogs already known to be capable of learning toy names through training and play can also pick up words simply by overhearing people speak to each other.
Cognitive researcher Shany Dror of the Veterinary University of Vienna’s Clever Dog Lab has spent years running a “Genius Dog Challenge” that recruits canines who have shown particular ability to learn language through social interactions.
In her research she noticed that some dogs seemed to be listening in on their owners: “They would tell me stories, like we were talking about ordering a pizza, and then the dog came into the living room with the toy named pizza,” Dror said.
So she and a team out of Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University set out to test whether their group of particularly intelligent dogs could create the association of a new word to a new object without being directly taught the connection.