Dog owners have long suspected that their pets are more perceptive than they let on—especially when it comes to certain words. Utter the word "walk" or "park" and watch tails wag with electric anticipation. But, as a groundbreaking new study published in Science on January 8, 2026, reveals, a rare group of canines possess a truly remarkable talent: they can learn the names of new objects simply by overhearing their owners’ conversations, much like toddlers picking up words from adults’ chatter. The discovery, reported by Science, CNN, and Discover Magazine, challenges long-held beliefs about language learning and social cognition in animals.
Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Hungary, led by Dr. Shany Dror, set out to explore whether so-called Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs could pick up object names without direct instruction. These dogs are not your average household pets—they’re a rare breed (figuratively and sometimes literally) with an uncanny knack for learning toy names. Many are Border Collies, but the group also includes German Shepherds, Labrador Retrievers, Miniature Australian Shepherds, and mixes. Their owners, having noticed their dogs’ unusual talents, reached out to the research team after seeing calls for participation on social media and in advertisements.
The study’s design was simple yet clever. Ten GWL dogs were each introduced to two unfamiliar toys under two conditions. In the “addressed” scenario, owners interacted directly with their dogs, repeatedly naming the toys during play sessions. In the “overheard” condition, the owners discussed the toys with another person while the dog was present but not addressed—in fact, the dogs were separated by a child safety gate or placed in a dog bed to ensure they couldn’t interact with the toys or the owners. Throughout both scenarios, each toy’s name was mentioned for a total of only eight minutes, spread across several brief sessions.
When it came time to test the dogs’ learning, the toys were placed in a different room, and the owners asked their dogs to fetch each toy by name. The results were nothing short of astonishing. Seven out of the ten dogs successfully retrieved the correct toys in both the addressed and overheard conditions. Even more impressive, the dogs’ accuracy was 80% in the addressed scenario and a perfect 100% in the overheard scenario during the initial trials, according to Science and Discover Magazine.
“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,” Dr. Dror told Discover Magazine. This mirrors the way toddlers, as young as 18 months, learn new words by picking up on cues like gaze direction and communicative intent, a phenomenon well-documented in child development research and referenced by CNN.
But the researchers didn’t stop there. To further probe the dogs’ abilities, they introduced a twist: owners would show the dogs the toys, then put them out of sight in a bucket before naming them. Despite this temporal and visual separation, most of the dogs still managed to learn and remember the new labels. In fact, when tested two weeks later, the majority of these GWL dogs could still correctly identify the toys—a feat that would impress even the most ambitious preschooler.
“So, what we conclude from this is that the dogs are able to learn under very different conditions, and they’re doing it very flexibly,” Dror explained to CNN. “It tells us the depth of how much these dogs are able to understand our human interactions.”
What makes these findings so significant? For starters, it upends the notion that complex word learning from overheard speech is a uniquely human capability. According to Science, the study suggests that these socio-cognitive mechanisms are shared across species, indicating that the roots of language learning may lie in evolutionary social skills developed long before humans started speaking. Dr. Dror elaborated: “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.”
However, it’s important not to get carried away—these abilities are exceptionally rare. As CNN and Science both emphasized, typical family dogs do not learn object names by overhearing conversations. In fact, when the researchers repeated the overheard experiment with ten Border Collies who had never learned object names before, none managed to pick up the new labels. The Gifted Word Learner dogs stand out not just for their breed but for an extraordinary combination of individual predisposition and unique life experiences.
Dr. Claudia Fugazza, a senior scientist at ELTE, offered further insight: “These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels.” Yet, as Dror pointed out, “It’s a bit like comparing a bicycle and a car. They both ride, they both do this function, but the thing that propels them forward is very different.” In other words, while the outcome may look similar to human word learning, the underlying processes could be quite distinct.
Comparative psychologist Juliane Bräuer from Friedrich Schiller University Jena told CNN that while these results are fascinating, they’re not entirely without precedent. Similar abilities have been documented in bonobos and African grey parrots, though the latter usually involved some direct teaching. And while a 2025 study found that family dogs can recognize command words not directed at them, only GWL dogs have been shown to spontaneously learn object names—and to do so by eavesdropping on human conversations is a first.
So, what does this all mean for our understanding of dogs—and perhaps ourselves? For one, it highlights the deep social intelligence that some dogs possess, a product of millennia of domestication and co-evolution with humans. As Dror observed, “During the domestication process, the dogs that were the best in communicating with humans and in understanding humans were the ones that reproduced. And this is what we see today, that they’re so good at understanding human communication that some dogs are even able to learn when we’re not actually talking to them, just by passively observing us.”
While most dogs will never fetch a toy by name after overhearing a conversation, the rare Gifted Word Learners remind us just how much there is still to discover about the minds of our closest animal companions. Their abilities don’t just make for a great party trick—they provide a unique window into the evolution of communication and learning across species. And who knows? The next time you spell out “P-A-R-K,” your dog might just be listening—and learning—more than you think.
