Dogs might have more tricks up their furry sleeves than we knew, at least the smartest ones. Scientists have just found that some dogs’ cognitive skills can rival those of human toddlers.

Researchers in Budapest and elsewhere have been studying dogs especially gifted at learning and memorizing names for toys. In their latest study, they’ve shown these genius canines can pick up on new words by simply eavesdropping on their owners. The results indicate that humans aren’t the only ones able to learn from overheard speech, the researchers say.

“The current findings highlight the huge potential social cues have as a means of communicating with our dogs,” lead study author Shany Dror, an animal cognition researcher, told Gizmodo. “I hope that this is something that both dog owners and trainers will take into account in their day-to-day interactions with their dogs.”

Gifted word-learner dogs

Your average dog can easily be trained to associate human words with requested actions like “sit” or “stay.” But, according to Dror, only some dogs seem to be naturally adept at understanding and internalizing the connection between a specific word spoken by a person and the physical object it’s naming (usually a toy). The most talented of these canines, which the researchers have dubbed Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs, can learn the names of hundreds of dog toys while playing with their owners.

Basket is a 7-year-old female Border Collie who participated in the study. She’s said to know the names of over 200 dog toys. © Elle Baumgartel

For years, scientists at Eötvös Loránd (ELTE) University have been studying these dogs as part of a research project called the Genius Dog Challenge. Dror started contributing to the project while completing her PhD at ELTE, though she’s now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, in Austria.

The team’s previous research found that some GWL dogs can learn a new word with as few as four mentions of it (though without further reinforcing, they tend to forget quickly) and that they can retain the memory of a once-learned word for up to two years.

Dogs generally love to keep an ever-watchful eye over their owners. And the researchers wondered if GWL dogs could also learn new words just by paying close attention to their owners’ indirect cues. That’s a skill, studies have shown, that human babies tend to exhibit by the time they turn a year and a half.

Talented at overhearing

The researchers recruited ten gifted dogs and their owners for their experiments.

In the first phase of tests, they set up two conditions. In one, the dogs learned a new word as usual, with the owners repeatedly labeling an object in front of the dogs while playing with them. In the second, the dogs were still exposed to the object but only heard their owners label it through a conversation with another person. Two new toys were presented in each scenario. And the success of learning a new word was tested by placing the toy in a second room along with other toys and asking the dogs to bring it back to the owner (this setup ensured that the owners couldn’t influence the dogs’ choice).