The Modern Bark | Dog Training Tips

The average dog can learn as many as 150 words, a fairly substantial vocabulary beyond sit, stay and come. Research with several border collies has brought those vocabulary numbers up beyond 400 words, and a border collie named Chaser has learned the names of 1022 objects, which he can differentiate and fetch on command.  There appears to be no upper limit in Chaser's vocabulary lessons, as he continues to add words to his lexicon. In the wake of such impressive results, researchers Emile van der Zee, Helen Zulch and Daniel Mills sought to determine the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in canine learning. In the research article,  Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris): Is Shape Important?, the researchers sought to determine if shape bias existed in dogs as it does in humans. Experiments with human 2 year olds, have shown a "shape bias" exists in the learning of new words.  Simply put, once the child associates a name with ...