One study demonstrated Chaser’s ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object. This indicates clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning a receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1,022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, and an extensive vocabulary, a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.
A second experiment demonstrated that Chaser really understood that these were names and not commands to fetch the object. To test the independence of the meaning of nouns and commands, the researchers randomly would combine nouns with commands to see whether Chaser would react with the correct behavior toward the object in each trial. Chaser, without special training, did respond to each combination correctly, even on her first trial.
This demonstrated that she did indeed comprehend that the commands and proper-noun names have independent meanings. Researchers concluded that Chaser understood that names referred to particular objects, independent of the action requested involving that object.
A third experiment conveyed that Chaser also understood different names for different categories of objects or common nouns and not only those that referred to individual names or proper nouns. Chaser learned that the name “toy” referred to the 1022 objects that she had been allowed to play with, each with a proper noun name.
Chaser had formed categories represented by common nouns, indicating that she had mapped one label onto many objects. Chaser had also shown that she could map up to three labels onto the same object without making any mistakes. She did this by knowing the names of the proper nouns of all objects that were used in the experiment. She also had mapped the common noun “toy” onto these same objects. She had additional successes with two common nouns: “ball” and “Frisbee.” This conveyed that Chaser had mapped the third label onto these objects. She had demonstrated that she could map one-to-many and many-to-one in the noun/object categories, and indicated the flexibility in the referential nature of words in Border Collies.
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