Overheard word learning in dogs

Some 'gifted' dogs can learn a new object name simply by overhearing their owners refer to it—the study required owners to call a toy’s new name to each other in the dog's presence and later dogs retrieved the correctly named toy from another room. This shows dogs can perform referential mapping from third‑party speech, a capacity previously characterized in toddlers and few other species. — If replicated and generalized, this finding shifts debates on animal cognition, language origins, and the ethical/policy discussion about animal intelligence, training standards, and how we model learning in AI and robotics.