Sit Stay- Part 2

            Also in the article Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl! by Nicholas Wade, where a border collie learns to recognize words, I learned about the words that children pick up and how most of the words that we learn in our lifetime are known by the time we leave high school.

“Children pick up about 10 new words a day until, by the time they leave high school, they know around 60,000 words. Chaser learned words more slowly but faced a harder task: Each sound was new and she had nothing to relate it to, whereas children learn words in a context that makes them easier to remember. For example, knives, forks and spoons are found together” (Wade).

I also learned that there is some controversy in this matter relating children to how these animals spoke. “Chaser learns to link sounds to objects by brute repetition, which is not how children learn words. And she learns her words as proper nouns, which are specific labels for things, rather than as abstract concepts like the common nouns picked up by children” (Wade).

When I think of talking with a child I think of them talking about less specific nouns as in bread or chair not saying pita or rocking chair, respectively. They learn the bare basics and then build off of that, which is not what the dog does. The dog might build off of the sounds but most of his words are proper nouns, so it’s like learning a bunch of names of people to a child.

It would be interesting to conduct an experiment with a dog and a child. The dog could probably learn the words the child does with enough repetition but it might be hard when a lot of the sounds start sounding alike since it seems that they recognize things through the sounds and not exactly the word. 
Words- 255
Posts- 16 and 17