• Posted January 9, 2026

Gifted Dogs Can Learn Words By Eavesdropping On Family Conversations, Experiments Show

A basic part of dog training is teaching your pooch to recognize and respond to certain words like "sit,” “down” or “stay.”

But some particularly clever canines can develop an even more extensive vocabulary in the same way toddlers do: By eavesdropping on our conversations.

These “Gifted Word Learner” (GWL) dogs can learn names for objects by overhearing exchanges between members of their human families, researchers reported Jan. 8 in the journal Science.

The dogs’ capacity for learning words mirrors that of year-and-a-half-old toddlers, who learn new words by overhearing other people, researchers said.

“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” lead investigator Shany Drorwith, a postdoctoral research fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, said in a news release.

“Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors similar to those of young children,” Drorwith said.

For the new study, researchers tested 10 gifted dogs in two situations.

In the first, owners introduced two new toys to their dog and repeatedly labeled them, while interacting directly with their pet.

But in the second, the dog watched passively as their owner talked to another person about the toys, without addressing the pooch at all.

Each scenario lasted eight minutes, distributed across several brief sessions.

Then to test whether the dogs had learned the words, the toys were placed in a different room and the owners asked their pals to retrieve each object by name – for example, “Can you bring Teddy?”

Results showed the gifted dogs learned toy names from overheard speech about as well they did when directly told the names.

A second experiment brought even more thrilling results.

In this scenario, owners showed the dog a toy and then placed it inside a bucket, naming the toy only after it was out of the dog’s sight.

This more challenging task required the dogs to remember an object’s name even though it was no longer in front of them.

Nonetheless, most of the gifted dogs successfully learned the toy’s names and retrieved the right one when asked, researchers said.

“These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels,” senior scientist Claudia Fugazza, a research fellow at the university, said in a news release.

The study suggests that the ability to learn from overheard speech might rely on mechanisms that are shared across species, rather than being uniquely tied to human language, researchers said.

However, Gifted Word Learner dogs are extremely rare.

In an earlier 2021 study, a team led by Dror searched the world for dogs that had learned the names of their toys, and managed to find only six.

“These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language,” Dror said. “But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way — far from it.”

This study was part of a research project called the Genius Dog Challenge, which aims to understand the unique talents of Gifted Word Learner dogs.

Dog owners who believe their pets know multiple toy names can contact the researchers at geniusdogchallenge.official@gmail.com, or on Facebook or Instagram.

More information

The American Psychological Association has more on how dogs think.

SOURCE: Eötvös Loránd University, news release, Jan. 8, 2025