A groundbreaking new study, however, shows that some gifted dogs can also match given spoken words to dissimilar-looking objects that perform certain functions. That said, such is not the case with a select group of seven Gifted Word Learner dogs studied by scientists from Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University. Human toddlers do it instinctively … and so, apparently, do Gifted Word Learner dogs. For the study, the seven dogs learned two verbal labels, "Pull" and "Fetch," during daily at-home play sessions with their owners. "We discovered that these Gifted Word Learner dogs can extend labels to items that have the same function or that are used in the same way," says the lead scientist, Dr. Claudia Fugazza.