Teaching an old dog new tricks: ‘gifted’ canines learn words by overhearing their owners
You may want to choose your words carefully around your canine companion: new research reveals that a group of ‘gifted’ dogs can learn new names by eavesdropping on their owners.
‘Gifted word learner’ dogs are capable of picking up object names simply by overhearing their owners’ conversations, similar to an 18-month-old child. The findings, from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) and the University of Veterinary Medicine (Vienna, Austria), suggest that humans are not the only animals that can learn new labels in this way, offering valuable insights into the origins of language-related cognition.
By 1.5 years old, human children can learn new words for objects by passively observing the conversations of others. This ability requires a number of social skills: following others’ gaze and attentional state, taking another’s perspective, monitoring conversations, understanding intentions and segmenting target words.
Previous research has demonstrated that other species may be able to use overheard speech to map labels onto objects, too, suggesting that they possess functionally similar social cognitive skills to infants observing third-party interactions. For example, two bonobos and an African gray parrot have been documented label learning in such a way.
Turning their attention to man’s best friend, the researchers behind the recent study revealed that some dogs are also in this exclusive club, capable of learning new labels by overhearing their owners’ interactions.
They investigated this in a series of experiments involving ten ‘gifted word learner’ dogs – a subset of clever canines with an unusually canny ability for learning object labels. First, owners introduced two new toys and repeatedly labeled them for 1 minute, followed by 3 minutes of naturalistic play without labeling and up to 20 minutes for the dog to freely explore the toy. This was repeated twice daily for four non-consecutive days.
Then, the dogs were exposed to an overhearing condition, which followed the same protocol as before, only the labels were introduced as part of an interaction between the animals’ owners, during which they didn’t communicate with the dogs at all.
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On day 12, the dogs were tasked with a label comprehension test, where they had to identify the two new toys among nine familiar toys by fetching them when asked. In both conditions, seven out of ten dogs retrieved the new toys at a rate significantly above chance level.
When the researchers analyzed only the first trial for each new toy, to rule out learning during the test, the dogs retrieved the toys accurately 80% of the time in the first condition, when the toy was labeled directly, and 100% in the second condition, when the labeling was overheard.
In a final test, owners showed eight dogs the toys and then placed them out of their view, naming the objects only when they were hidden. Despite not being able to see the objects while hearing their names, most of the gifted dogs were still able to learn the new labels – the group-level accuracy after the first trial was 81%.
“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” concluded lead scientist Shany Dror. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.”
While gifted dogs “provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language,” the researchers didn’t find any evidence of learning in typical dogs. “We do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way – far from it,” Dror added.