Overview
- A team led by Shany Dror at Eötvös Loránd University tested ten identified “gifted word learner” dogs against ten typical family Border Collies in controlled experiments.
- Dogs overheard humans name new toys while being deliberately ignored, sometimes with the object out of view, and were later asked to fetch from an array.
- Gifted dogs selected the correct newly named toy at high rates, about 80% after direct naming and reported 100% when names were heard only in human-to-human conversation, within a small sample.
- Recall of the new names persisted in follow-up tests roughly two weeks after exposure.
- Typical family dogs showed no clear evidence of learning from overheard speech, and the authors stress the ability appears rare and warrants further research.