Our perceptions and understanding of what a dog is capable of (as far as thinking, reasoning and language recognition) has changed dramatically since my time in vet school.
Did any of you see the 60 minutes segment on the
Smartest dog in the world? This dog has over 1000 toys he can find by name and then follow a command with what to do with it.
Individual Dogs have different levels of intelligence and different areas where they excel or not. But the bottom line is that they have way more ability that we ever thought.
Discrimination between a one or two syllable name seems to be pretty elementary ability most dogs should breeze through.
Doug