Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.
Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.
He bought Chaser as a puppy in 2004 from a local breeder and started to train her for four to five hours a day. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She was taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten.
Now if Chaser could teach Dr Pilley to bark correctly, wouldn’t that be something?
Cats have spent centuries developing the meow to communicate with humans, but have had only modest success. They, too, might benefit from The Rev Dr Pilley’s methods.
Reminds me of [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxRMYEgvZE&playnext=1&list=PLD6C640A6D9C78230&index=8]the great dog stories[/url] that the late Lewis Grizzard used to tell.
I had a dog whose vocabulary seemed to me to be about 50 words and I thought it quite impressive. I’ll have to re-assess this. I realised that the animal might have capabilities beyond what I expected when she not only reacted to my spelling of the word “cheese” in order to avoid the inevitable frenzy that accompanied any reference to her favorite food, but also seemed to react strongly when I switched to French or Spanish to disguise the word.
Cats can develop an understanding of words also. Our Norwegian Forest Cat not only has an impressive vocabulary of words that elicit appropriate responses from her, she has also developed a vocabulary of sounds that quite specifically convey messages to us.
Her sounds seem to be imitative of human vocalizations but lacking in an ability to produce the sounds of ‘hard’ consonants, just the aspirant sounds. Though she does make a ‘more or less’ barking sound when she wants to attract attention. Anyhow, my wife and I have a lot of fun with her vocalizations.
Since the thread has mentioned cats who talk, anybody who hasn’t read the classic Saki story Tobermory may want to take a look.
[url=http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005335.html]Here[/url] (about half-way down the page) are two Far Side cartoons I’ve always loved. The article makes Mr. Larson’s wisdom appear to be flawed. (For those who like dogs, the video clip is worth watching, too.)
I have a very nice and sweet dog who apparently doesn’t know any nouns. Since I only live 30 miles from Spartanburg maybe Dr. Pilley will let my dog have a play date with Chaser?
montanan, you beat me to it!
having looked after my best friend’s cat when she’s gone out of state, I swear that critter can caterwaul “they left me alone. I’m all alone!” when you stop by to feed him. He doesn’t vocalize this way when the house is occupied.
while this cat can clearly bemoan his abandonment, it’s not the kind of trick I’d want many cats to pick up. it’s both pathetic and loud.