So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can affect how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to figure out which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Bernard is a dog, the child may see a cow and say dog, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not realize that the neighbor's chihuahua also counts as a dog. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the worddog. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under a single label may vary from language to language.