I absolutely loooove howstuffworks.com and there's one article on there about a border collie named Rico who appears to have a vocabulary of 200 words. They performed some tests on him to see if it was actually true. The article also references Clever Hans. Apparently they isolated that variable to show that Rico doesn't pick up on subconscious cues like Clever Hans. Pretty impressive!
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/pets/dogs-understand-words1.htm
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
what about language, though? i was taking with a friend who does linguistics and we discussed these animals with big vocabularies. interesting, but they don't have any syntax. just word recognition (like when a dog understands "sit.").
ReplyDelete