Some Dogs Can Expand Their Vocabulary By Eavesdropping On Their Owners

new York : Dogs are great at learning action commands like “sit” and “stay.” They are less good at remembering the names of things, such as the names of squeaky or stuffed toys.

Only an elite group of gifted word-learning dogs can memorize the names of hundreds of toys. Scientists know about 50 such dogs exist, but they are not yet sure what is behind their long-talking skills.

Now new research is pushing the limits of what dogs can do.

Scientists already knew that these extraordinary pups could learn the names of stuffed pizza and donut toys by playing with their owners. In the latest study, they discovered that pups can also understand new names by overhearing them.

Ten talented dogs, including a Border collie named Basket and a Labrador named Augie, watched their owner hold a new toy and talk about it with another person. The pups were then told to go to another room and pick that particular toy from among many other toys.

Seven out of 10 dogs successfully learned the names of new toy stingrays and armadillos by passively listening to their owners.

“This is the first time we have seen a specific group of dogs able to learn tags from overheard interactions,” said study author Shany Dror, of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the Austrian University of Veterinary Medicine.

The pups did well even when their owners placed the toy in an opaque box and then talked about it with someone else, creating a disconnect between seeing the object and hearing its name.

Only a few other animals, such as parrots and monkeys, have demonstrated mastery of this type of eavesdropping. This is also important for human development: Children under 2 can pick up new words they hear, including words their parents did not intend.

But Dror said these particular dogs were fully grown, so the brain mechanisms that enable them to eavesdrop were likely different from humans.

Heidi Lyn, an animal cognition expert at the University of South Alabama, said the new study shows that “animals do a lot more cognitively than you might think.” He had no role in the study, published Thursday in the journal Science.

Not all dogs pick up on things like this, so your furry friend is unlikely to learn names while snacking on leftovers under the dinner table.

Dror hopes to continue studying gifted dogs and find out what cues they perceive. These are some of his most enthusiastic and complex research topics.

“Sometimes we have dogs come into the lab and that’s really nice,” she said, “but most of the time someone pees on the couch. So that happens.”