The First Words I Will Teach My Pup

Nyx, like everyone in our family, is a huge fan of books. A cuurent favourite is the board book I'll Teach My Dog a Lot of Words, which has lots of fun opposites and simple vocabulary. 

My wife was reading the book with Nyx, and paused at the end of the first line: "The first words I will teach my pup are dig a hole and fill it..." "UP!" Nyx finished the sentence!  Very exciting. She can do it with other books, too, and will point to the word "red" and say "red", and "cat" for "cat", and can identify lots of letters correctly. 

I think this is pretty amazing. And then I wondered, is she knowing the words or just remembering them in specific contexts?  And I read a few articles on rote memory in Autistic kids. Bingo.  She's memorizing - which is still learning! - but not necessarily knowing what it is that she's memorized. Or maybe she does. I wish she could tell me.