Could your dog be listening to your conversations?

Sit. Lie down. Stay. Paw...if you're lucky! Dogs learning words is not a new thing.

BUT researchers have found that some very clever dogs might actually be listening to human conversations and learning new words from it.

They it's similar to the way some young toddlers can learn language.

One of the researchers, Dr Shany Dror, says she'd heard stories of owners "ordering a pizza" and then their dog bringing them a "toy named pizza".

That's where the inspiration for the research came from.

The study was done by researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

To test if the dogs could learn words from eavesdropping, the researchers used toys.

Some of the dogs were told by their owners what the toys' names were, and other dogs learned the name of the toys by eavesdropping on conversations between their human family members.

The scientists found that the clever dogs learned just as well from eavesdropping as they did when directly taught.

Paw-sitively genius!

Don't be surprised if you try this at home and your dog doesn't quite get it.

These experiments were done with a very gifted group of pups called Gifted Word Learners.

They're dogs who are incredibly intelligent and already have a very large vocabulary because they can learn toy names through training.

But it's still worth a try - maybe your dog is a secret genius!