SCIENCE DAILY
Baboon foot hitting a word on the screen to indicate if it is an English word. PHOTO/CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange)
Learning to read is not just to do with speech, but also with the ability to recognize and memorize regular patterns among the letters that make up words, according to a new study on baboons. New results show that monkeys identify specific combinations of letters in words and detect anomalies — a capacity that certainly existed before speech.
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The baboons were taught to press an oval shape if the word was spelt correctly or a cross if it was not, and were rewarded with a piece of cereal for each right answer. In just a few days — and after several thousands tries — the baboons learned to distinguish English words like “bank” from similar nonwords like “jank.” More surprisingly still, after memorizing the spelling of several dozen words, the baboons gave right answers for words that they had never seen before. This suggests that they did not memorize the overall shape of the words, although they certainly would have the ability to do so. According to the researchers, the monkeys can detect and memorize regular patterns in the organization of words: they are able to learn frequent letter combinations in English words, and thus detect anomalies, i.e. letters not in their usual place.
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