Toddlers can pick up new words just by overhearing conversations. Now, new research suggests that some intelligent dogs can expand their vocabulary in just the same way.

Children as young as 18 months old can learn labels for objects by listening to other people’s exchanges, according to a study published earlier this month in the journal Science. They do this by monitoring the speakers’ gaze, picking up communicative cues and extracting key words from sentences.

Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary wanted to find out whether dogs that were “gifted” at learning toy names could also learn new words simply by eavesdropping.

These gifted dogs were assessed and identified when their owners, after seeing social media posts or advertisements, contacted the researchers to say they believe their dog knows the names of toys.

For the study, owners of 10 gifted dogs first introduced two new toys and named them, repeatedly saying the toy names while interacting directly with their pet.

These interactions lasted for multiple minute-long sessions across several days.

Researchers found that “eight minutes was enough for the dogs to learn the name of two new toys,” cognitive researcher and animal trainer Shany Dror said. Seven out of the 10 dogs reliably identified and retrieved the new toys when asked to do so by their owners.

The researchers repeated the experiment in “overheard” conditions with the same owner and dog pairs. Owners included the name of the new toy in sentences and passed the toy among themselves, but they could not look at or communicate with their dogs, and their dogs were not allowed to interact with them or grab the toy.

To stop each dog from trying to reach the toy, the owners sat at a dining table or on the floor while the dog was put behind a child safety gate, or was in a dog cradle or bed.

Seven out of the 10 dogs were again reliably able to identify and retrieve the new toys after overhearing the toy names – six of them were among the same dogs that performed well in the first experiment.

This showed that gifted dogs “can learn novel object labels by overhearing interactions, in a manner functionally similar” to young children, the researchers said.

Eager to test whether the dogs were also using social cues to learn new object labels, like infants do, the researchers carried out a third experiment with eight dogs, four of which were among the original 10.

This time, the pet owners said the name of the toy within sentences only after they had placed the toy in a bucket and the toy was out of view.

Again, when tested, the majority of the dogs correctly identified the new toys – and they still remembered the names of the toys two weeks later.

The findings also suggest the complex cognitive and social abilities that help humans learn by overhearing others probably “evolved before language, and that’s why dogs can also do it,” Dror said.

幼儿仅通过旁听对话就能学会新词汇。最新研究表明，部分聪明的狗狗也能以同样的方式扩展自己的词汇量。

月初发表在《科学》杂志上的一项研究显示，18个月大的幼儿就能通过观察说话者的视线、捕捉交流线索并从句子中提取关键词，从而通过倾听他人对话学会物体的名称。

匈牙利罗兰大学的研究人员希望探究那些在玩具名称学习上 “天赋异禀”的狗狗是否也能通过旁听学会新词汇。这些天赋狗狗是在主人看到社交媒体帖子或广告后联系研究人员，声称自家狗狗认识玩具名称时被发现并评估的。

研究中，10只天赋狗狗的主人首先介绍了两个新玩具并为其命名，在与宠物互动时反复说出玩具名称。这种互动持续数天，每天进行多次一分钟左右的训练。

认知研究员兼动物训练师莎尼·德罗尔表示：“八分钟就足够这些狗狗学会两个新玩具的名称。” 当主人要求时，10只狗狗中有7只能可靠地识别并取回新玩具。

研究人员在与同一组主人和狗狗的 “旁听” 条件下重复了实验。主人在句子中加入新玩具名称并互相传递玩具，但不能看向或与狗狗交流，狗狗也不被允许与主人互动或抓取玩具。

为了阻止狗狗试图接触玩具，主人坐在餐桌或地板上，而狗狗被安置在儿童安全门后、狗摇篮或狗床中。

结果显示，10只狗狗中有7只在旁听玩具名称后仍能可靠地识别并取回新玩具，其中6只是在第一次实验中表现良好的狗狗。这表明天赋狗狗 “能够通过旁听互动学习新物体标签，其功能方式与幼儿相似。”

为测试狗狗是否像婴儿一样使用社交线索学习新物体标签，研究人员对8只狗狗进行了第三次实验(其中4只来自原始组)。这次主人在将玩具放入桶中且玩具不可见后，才在句子中说玩具名称。

测试时，大多数狗狗仍能正确识别新玩具，且两周后仍记得玩具名称。

德罗尔指出，这些发现表明人类通过旁听学习的复杂认知和社会能力可能“在语言出现前就已演化形成，这也是狗狗也能做到的原因。”

(Translated by DeepSeek)