Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants.

Children as young as 18 months can acquire novel words by overhearing third-party interactions. Demonstrating similar learning processes in nonhuman species would indicate that the social-cognitive skills supporting this process are not exclusively human but may have evolved, or can develop, in other species, offering valuable insights into the origins of language-related cognition. In this study, we demonstrated that a small group of Gifted Word Learner dogs, which possess an extensive vocabulary of object labels, can learn new labels by overhearing their owners' interactions. Moreover, we show that these dogs can acquire novel object-label mappings even when the labels and objects are not presented simultaneously. Taken together, these results suggest that Gifted Word Learner dogs possess sociocognitive skills functionally parallel to those of 18-month-old children. Editor's summary: Any dog owner will tell you that dogs understand many words, and studies support this impression. In addition to dogs with regular, "family dog" knowledge levels are dogs with an extraordinary level of word comprehension. These dogs have been called "gifted word learners" and they appear idiosyncratically across countries, breeds, and households. Dror et al. examined the ability of these dogs to pick up words through conversations not directed at them. Using an approach designed to study understanding in toddlers, they found that the dogs were able learn words through overhearing just like, or even better than, 1.5-year-old children. —Sacha Vignieri [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]