I Know More Than 1,000 Words!    [28-01-2011] Dogs are smart animals and can understand many human words. Some dogs are so smart that they are used to do important jobs such as guiding the blind and rescuing people. However, it is not common for a dog to understand more than 200 human words. However, to our surprise a super smart dog in the U.S. knows more than 1,000 words! The smart dog is called Chaser. She is a border collie and lives in the U.S. According to Alliston Reid, a psychology professor at Wofford College in South Carolina, the six-year-old dog has learned the names for 1,022 toys! “She just might be the smartest dog ever. Chaser understands that names refer to particular objects,” he said. Professor Reid began language training when the dog was only five months old. He bought huge numbers of stuffed animals, balls, and children’s toys to train her to remember the names. He gave each toy a name and wrote down the name on each item with a marker pen. “I trained Chaser for three years. She learned the names for 1,022 toys during that period. Chaser can also differentiate her toys by categories. She might be able to learn even more words, but I stopped at 1,022 after three years of training simply because of pressure to publish this study,” Professor Reid explained. The study was published last week in the journal Behavioral Processes.     출처: 어린이 영자신문 키즈타임즈 (www.kidstimes.net)