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baboon can get the hang one of the canonical elements of read even though they have no lingual skills , a new field of study suggests .
baboon in the study were able to differentiate between speech andnonsense chronological succession of letters , even sometimes when they had never seen the words before , research worker reported .
Baboons can master one of the basic elements of reading, although they have no linguistic skills, a French team reports. The monkeys in this study learned how to tell the difference between printed sequences of letters that made up actual English words and other, nonsense sequences.
" We wanted to know whether they could actually master this undertaking , which is quite complex , " study researcher Jonathan Grainger , of Aix - Marseille University in France , told LiveScience . " Our baboon specialist think this was go to be unacceptable . "
The monkey life
The six baboon in the study are part of an outside research colony and have been train to do chore on a computerlike video display . They are free to walk up to this computing gadget and roleplay with it at will . The baboons , which are well fed , spend about an hour a day on average on the computer , play for surplus nutrient rewards .
Of the six baboons used in the study, one stood out as a star learner. Dan the baboon learned about 300 words in a six week trial. The others learned about 100 words.
" What ’s really nice about it , there’sno stressassociated with testing an fauna and putting it into the examination area , " Grainger say . " These baboons are motivated . They are doing this because they need to . … They do it just for playfulness . " [ Smarty Pants ! 10 Creative Creatures ]
In this study , the baboons were indicate four - alphabetic character words and four - alphabetic character non - word . All the non - speech had similar properties to existent words — they contained a vowel , for example . Some examples were dran , lons , telk and virt .
recognise news
If the baboon recognized a word, they pushed the oval button. If they knew it was a non-word, they pressed the cross button.
When baboonsrecognized a Christian Bible , they pushed an ellipse button on the display . When they thought it was a non - Holy Writ , they pressed a cross - shaped button . Whenever they made the correct identification , they were rewarded with a treat .
Real Christian Bible were innovate one at a time , and repeated ( with a slew of non - words in between ) until the baboon were able to recognize them 80 percent of the time .
After they learned several words , the baboons became considerably able to pick up on factual words they had never seen before : About 60 percent of the time they imagine right on the first demonstration of a new word .
For example , after learing the Word " that , " " then " and " this , " the baboon would get going to discern the " th"letter combining . Then , when gift with " tenuous , " they used this information to decide that it ’s belike a Son , Grainger said .
" They are build up up information about what define this category of words with obedience to the family of non - words , " Grainger said . " The baboon has to be using information about letters and how often they pass and which other letters they come about with . "
Brainy baboon
This event seemed to indicate that thebrain processesthat countenance people to translate are establish on much more primal skill that expected . " They do n’t have language and there ’s no tie with take at all , " Grainger say of the baboons . When we read , " we are basically mimic what we are doing when we discern everyday objects , something the baboons do just as well as us . "
This recognition of casual objects is a mental process called " object recognition . " An good example of target identification would be the power to recognize a table you had never seen before . Because people understand the relationship between the various part of a tabular array — the legs and tabletop — they can greet the new objective as one they are already familiar with , a table .
Other hierarch are also able to key target this elbow room , and would plausibly be able-bodied to get the hang the dispute between words and non - password , the investigator tell . It could be that any animal with a optical system that can identify objects the mode people do would be capable to discriminate between word and non - Christian Bible , the investigator said .
The study was published today ( April 12 ) in the daybook Science .
