6 Brainy Baboons Pick Words from Gibberish

Baboons can master one of the basic elements of reading even though they have no linguistic skills, a new study suggests.

Baboons in the study were able to differentiate between words and nonsense sequences of letters, even sometimes when they had never seen the words before, researchers reported.

"We wanted to know whether they could actually master this task, which is quite complex," study researcher Jonathan Grainger, of Aix-Marseille University in France, told LiveScience. "Our baboon specialist thought this was going to be impossible."

The monkey life

The six baboons in the study are part of an outdoor research colony and have been trained to do tasks on a computerlike display. They are free to walk up to this computer and play with it at will. The baboons, which are well fed, spend about an hour a day on average on the computer, playing for extra food rewards.

"What's really nice about it, there's no stress associated with testing an animal and putting it into the testing area," Grainger said. "These baboons are motivated. They are doing this because they want to. … They do it just for fun."

In this study, the baboons were shown four-letter words and four-letter non-words. All the non-words had similar properties to actual words — they contained a vowel, for instance. Some examples were dran, lons, telk and virt.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/19648-baboons-recognize-words.html