Eavesdropping Isn’t Uniquely Human — Some Dogs Can Do It Too
If you’ve ever tried to casually mention a walk without triggering a full-body tail quake, you already know your dog is a master of pattern recognition. New research suggests that for a rare group of dogs, overhearing conversations isn’t just a trigger for excitement — it’s a way to learn new words.
The study, published in Science, shows that a small group of so-called Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs can learn the names of new objects by overhearing their owners — without being spoken to or trained directly. Rather than being tied only to human language, this kind of learning may draw on social skills shared across species. In tests, the dogs’ abilities matched those of 18- to 23-month-old toddlers, who are known to acquire new words by listening in on adult conversations.
“We showed that [GWL] dogs can extract a lot of information from observing the social interactions of their owners. These social interactions are very complex. They include a variety of different stimuli, for example, the way the owners intonate their words, the speed at which they speak, and how they shift their gaze between the objects and their partners,” says lead scientist Shany Dror.
Learning Object Names Is Rare in Dogs
For most dogs, words trigger actions — sit moves the body, stay holds it still. Object names are harder: a toy doesn’t signal what to do, which is why few dogs ever learn labels for objects.
These rare GWL dogs can learn names for objectives through everyday play, not training. Their sensitivity to human communication raised a deeper question: could dogs learn object names just by watching people talk?
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Testing Dogs’ Eavesdropping Skills
To find out whether dogs could learn words by eavesdropping, the researchers worked with 10 GWL dogs.
Each dog was introduced to two unfamiliar toys under two different conditions. In one, owners interacted directly with their dogs while naming the toys during play — a setup that reflected the way these dogs had learned object names in the past. In the other, owners talked about the toys with another person while the dogs passively observed from the sidelines, never being addressed or instructed themselves.
Across several sessions, each dog heard the name of each toy for a total of eight minutes. When it came time to test what the dogs had learned, the toys were moved to a separate room and the dogs were asked to retrieve them by name.
Seven of the 10 dogs retrieved the correct toys in both learning situations, often on their very first attempts. In early trials, the dogs chose the right toy about 80 percent of the time when taught directly — and 100 percent of the time when they had learned only by overhearing their owners’ conversations.
“I designed this experiment because I thought that the GWL dogs were picking up on something while they observed their owners’ interactions,” says Dror. “So, I wasn’t so surprised to see that they had learned the names of the toys but I was very surprised to see how accurate and confident they were when we came to test them on what they had learned.”
To push the test further, owners showed the dogs the toys, placed them in a bucket, and named them only afterward. Even with that separation, most of the dogs still learned the correct names.
Rethinking Dogs’ Social Intelligence
The findings don’t suggest that all dogs learn words this way, but they do offer a rare glimpse into the social skills that make word learning possible.
“These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language,” said Dror in a press release. “But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way — far from it.”
Going forward, the authors hope the findings will deepen appreciation for dogs’ social skills — and help us better realize their full potential.
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