- May 10, 2010
- 08:30 AM
- 234 views
Monday Pets: How Do Dogs Learn New Words?
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
...and what can word-learning in dogs teach us about the evolution of language in humans?
What is involved in the learning of a single new word? Consider the word "tiger", being learned by a child with already a modest vocabulary, at least for animal words. First the child must make a new entry in the mental lexicon - that "tiger" is a word in the first place. He has to categorize it as a noun. It has to be categorized under "animal" (a supernym) and related to its hyponyms, like "Sumatran tige........ Read more »
Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004) Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for "Fast Mapping". Science, 304(5677), 1682-1683. DOI: 10.1126/science.1097859
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