dogs can learn words in one trial
Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer show that a border collie named Rico is able to learn words in a single trial, is able to recall the words months later, and has a vocabulary of about 200 words, similar to a three year old human.
If there are a bunch of items in front of him and he knows the names for all but one of them, and you say, “bring me ___”, where ____ is a word that he doesn’t know, he infers that ____ is the name for the new item.
So far, the word learning has been formally studied only in the context of a single task (“fetch”). But anecdotal evidence suggests that the dog can apply the learned word knowledge in other contexts, too. Future research along these lines is needed before we can conclude that the dogs think of “words” the same way humans do.
Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer. Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping”. Science 2004; 304 (5677) : 1682-1683. (in Reports)