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. 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. She says the dogs’ ease and flexibility applying words by function, similar to how human children begin extending their vocabularies, was surprising. “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.