Dogs with Large Vocabularies Can Understand Category Words, Not Just NamesNEWS | 27 November 2025I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes.
Arya, a six-year-old border collie in Italy, can learn a new toy’s name with just one or two mentions. Her owners say she even knows words for her favorite foods; when pizza is on the menu, the word has to be whispered. Arya’s gift made her a natural subject for research showing that some dogs with unusually large vocabularies can go beyond simply memorizing terms.
For the new study, published in Current Biology, owners of 10 talented dogs—mostly border collies—taught them words for objects in two categories: tug toys, called “pulls,” and fetch toys, called “throws.” All toys were different in size, shape and color so appearance could not guide learning.
Arya was one of 10 gifted word-learner dogs—eight border collies, one blue heeler, one Labrador retriever and one Welsh corgi pembroke—to participate in the new experiment. Simone Avezza
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After four weeks of training, brand-new toys with a variety of designs were introduced. This time the dogs only experienced each toy’s function, either tugging or fetching, during play; they were not taught words for any of them. After a week of play, when asked to fetch a pull or a throw, the seven dogs that completed all experimental phases chose the right toy about two thirds of the time—well above the 12.5 percent expected for selections by chance. “These gifted word-learner dogs not only are able to memorize the labels of many different objects but also can extend a familiar word to new objects that share the same function, even if they look very different,” says Claudia Fugazza, the study’s lead author and an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
Fugazza emphasizes that these animals are exceptional; most family dogs never build such vocabularies. She says she was surprised by the dogs’ ease and flexibility in applying words by function, akin to how human children begin extending their vocabularies through everyday exposure.
Arya with a rope toy. Simone Avezza
Elika Bergelson, a Harvard University language scientist who was not part of the new study, says human infants “mostly rely on how things look. But by 14 months they can also use role or function—for instance, telling apart who is chasing and who is being chased in a scenario—to extend words” to new things, much like the dogs in the study did. In everyday life, function and appearance usually go together: all cups share a basic shape because it makes them good at holding liquid. “Unlike the real world, where ropes look tug-worthy and balls appear throwable, this study isolates the function,” Bergelson says. “Taking away visual cues is a clean way to probe how categories might form across species.”
Back home, Arya keeps busy with her favorite search games and word play, oblivious to her superpower. “Because these dogs live in families and pick up words naturally,” Fugazza says, “their parallel to early child learning could offer scientists unique possibilities to explore how language-related abilities might have evolved—and how they can emerge in a nonlinguistic species.”Author: Sarah Lewin Frasier. Anirban Mukhopadhyay. Source
