Talking to Listening Pets

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8282180/how_to_talk_to_your_dog.html?cat=53

A very important point for those who happen to be blessed with Listening Pets: it takes much longer for them to learn combinations and idioms, especially combinations of words they may have learned as triggers like "sit down" or "no food." This seems to be true for humans too. If we learn a phrase as a combination of particles (words), we can then isolate the particle within the phrase that distinguishes "food now" from "no food now" or "up the steps" from "down the steps." If we initially learn that one sound means one thing and another sound means another thing, then it will be much harder to understand that the combination of those two sounds means something completely different. Humans do learn words like "pineapple," but can we blame other animals if they never learn that "sit down" might mean something different from either "Sit!" or "Down!"?