“Where’s your red ball? Get your squeaky chicken!” If you’ve ever said something like this to your dog, you might not be surprised that some dogs actually know which toy you’re talking about.
But here’s the wild part. A new study says that dogs who are good at learning words can also figure out what a toy is just by how it’s used during play. They don’t even need to see it or hear its name to understand what kind of toy it is.
The study, published September 18 in Current Biology, gives us a new look at just how smart dogs can be. It shows that dogs might be thinking on a deeper level than we thought — kind of like how young kids learn to connect objects and actions.
How It All Started
The idea came from another experiment that blew researchers’ minds. “This work came about after a [dog] in another study not only generalized her own toys into categories like ball, rope and ring but could also sort toys she’d never seen before into those categories,” says Claudia Fugazza, an animal-behavior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
That dog didn’t just remember names. She could actually understand what kind of toy something was, even if it was brand new. “We wanted to test whether dogs could also classify a toy based strictly on how it is used during play rather than on shared physical traits,” Fugazza explains.
So, Fugazza and her team decided to dig deeper. Could dogs tell what a toy was — a ball, a rope or a ring — just by watching someone use it?
Meet the “Gifted Word Learners”
The study focused on a special group of dogs called gifted word learners. These are dogs — many of them border collies — who know the names of lots of toys. Some can remember dozens, even hundreds, of words they’ve learned naturally while playing at home.
For this project, Fugazza and her team brought in 11 gifted word learners and their owners. In the end, seven dogs completed the whole experiment.
Now, that might sound like a small number but it’s actually a big deal. Most earlier animal studies were done in labs, using animals that had been trained over and over to perform certain tasks. This time, the dogs were just doing what they always do — playing at home.
“This is the first study exploring this cognitive skill in animals in their natural environment — in the case of dogs, at home playing naturally with their owners,” Fugazza says.
What Made This Study Different
In the past, scientists couldn’t always tell if animals were using visual clues, smells or other hints to figure things out. Maybe a dog just picked a toy because it looked like another toy they knew. But in this study, the researchers made sure the dogs had to rely only on how the toy was used.
For example, if an owner threw one toy like a ball and tugged another like a rope, the dog had to guess what kind of toy it was — not based on what it looked like but based on how it was played with. No words, labels or hints. Just play.
And these clever pups got it right.
Smarter Than You’d Think
To understand how impressive this is, researchers compared it to how human toddlers learn. According to the study, the dogs’ skill level is about the same as that of a young child learning to group objects by function.
Vanessa Woods, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and director of the Duke Puppy Kindergarten project, was impressed by what this means for dog intelligence.
“The fact that this learning happened [naturally], not in a lab with thousands of training trials, suggests that dogs’ ability to infer function from context is both more sophisticated and more ecologically valid than we’ve appreciated,” Woods says.
In simpler words, these dogs didn’t need a scientist to drill them with lessons. They just learned it by watching and playing with their humans — the same way toddlers pick things up at home.
“It demonstrates that dogs are not only memorizing labels but can also flexibly use them in a way that reflects deeper categorization,” Woods adds.
Playing, Learning, Thinking
If you think about it, dogs spend a lot of time doing things that involve thinking — recognizing people, remembering routes, even understanding emotions. But this study shows that they can go a step further. They can mentally organize information and make sense of it, like sorting toys into groups based on what you do with them.
Fugazza says it’s not just about fetching or chewing. It’s about dogs being able to recognize, remember and infer — to use what they know to figure out something new. “It takes a lot of cognitive processing to do what they’re doing,” she explains.
Imagine your dog watching you toss a ball for the first time. They’ve never seen that ball before but they can still tell it’s a “ball” just from the way it’s used. That’s what these dogs were doing, connecting the action to the category without anyone saying a word.
The Next Steps
Fugazza and her team aren’t done yet. They want to see what else dogs can do with this kind of mental labeling. Can they group toys by texture or sound? Can they tell the difference between objects used by humans versus those used by dogs? There’s still a lot to explore.
“Future studies may explore what other mental categories the dogs can create and the brain mechanisms involved,” Fugazza says. She’s excited about what this could mean for understanding how dogs think.
Her favorite part was the dogs who helped make the discovery. She calls them her “ambassadors to understanding dog cognition.”
Still, Fugazza is careful not to say all dogs can do this. “Based on the fact that her subjects were gifted word learners — her ‘ambassadors to understanding dog cognition,’ as she calls them — Fugazza can’t say all dogs have this functional-labeling skill. ‘But I wouldn’t exclude that possibility.’”
Why It Matters
This study might sound small, just a handful of dogs playing with toys but it opens up a big question about how dogs see the world. Maybe when you say, “Go get your ball,” your dog isn’t just guessing based on memory. Maybe they actually know what makes something a “ball.”
It also shows how much dogs learn from being part of human lives. They don’t just follow commands. They watch, listen and they make sense of what we do.
So next time your dog brings you the right toy, remember — there’s more going on in that furry head than you might think. They’re not just playing fetch. They’re thinking, learning and maybe even putting things into mental categories, one squeaky chicken at a time.
And who knows? Maybe your dog’s already a “gifted word learner” — just waiting for you to notice.
