Fetch Mickey Mouse After years of training, the dog Chaser learned the names of more than 1000 toys (Pilley & Reid, 2011). When commanded to get one—“goldfish,” “chipmunk,” “Mickey Mouse”—her ability to retrieve the correct item showed her knowledge of the words. Chaser’s amazing abilities reveal that dogs can acquire one component of human language: associating names with objects in the world. But many other aspects of language are uniquely human. Human children not only learn the meanings of words; they also generate novel combinations of words that follow grammatical rules—an ability unseen in other species (Yang, 2013).