September 18, 2025
2 min read
Some Dogs Can Learn Categories like Human Toddlers Do
These dogs can extend words to new objects based on function the way children do in early language learning
Researchers found that some dogs can learn terms for functional categories, such as ‘pull’ and ‘throw’ toys.
Iuliia Zavalishina/Getty Images
Arya, a six-year-old border collie in Italy, can learn a new toy’s name from just one or two mentions. Her owners say she even knows her favorite foods’ names; when pizza is on the menu, the word has to be whispered. Arya’s gift made her a natural for a new Current Biology study showing that some dogs with unusually large vocabularies can go beyond simply memorizing names.
For the study, owners of 10 talented dogs—mostly border collies—taught them words for 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.
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After four weeks of training, brand-new toys that looked nothing like typical pulls or throws 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 dogs chose the right toy two thirds of the time—well above the 12.5 percent expected by chance. “These gifted word-learner dogs are not only able to memorize the labels of many different objects, but can also extend a familiar word to new objects that share the same function, even if they look very different,” says study lead author Claudia Fugazza, an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
Fugazza emphasizes that these animals are exceptional; most family dogs never build such vocabularies. She says the dogs’ ease and flexibility applying words by function, similar to how human children begin extending their vocabularies, was surprising.
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 is 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.”
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