Baboons can ape humans with words ability, study reveals

IT MIGHT seem a remarkable thing to teach a baboon to read – but not so. A group of six monkeys in France have mastered a basic component of reading, being able to discriminate between a word and a non-word.

The level of accuracy was startling, given that it involved training the monkeys to use a touchscreen and then challenging them with either a real word or a jumble of letters.

They managed an accuracy of about 75 per cent, despite the real words being sprinkled in among 7,832 different non-words, the researchers write this morning in the journal Science.

The team from CNRS, France’s national centre for scientific research, and from Aix-Marseille University, wanted to learn whether it was possible to recognise words – given that they are actual visual objects – without also having linguistic skills.

We almost take for granted the initial information acquired when we look at characters on a page, the letters offered and their order.

This is known as orthographic information, the authors write. “Orthographic processing lies at the interface between the visual processing and the linguistic processing involved in written language comprehension.”

Baboons obviously can’t take the next step, converting the complete word into linguistic meaning, but could they learn to discriminate between a word and a non-word?

To answer this question the researchers placed six baboons in a standard zoo-like enclosure. The monkeys also had free access to cubicles fitted with touch screens.

They were shown a sequence of four-character words and could then choose word or non-word by touching the screen. Correct answers elicited a food reward.

This was no toss-of-the-coin exercise. Each session involved them responding to 100 words, 25 new ones, 25 previously learned words and 50 non-words. “Each new word was added to the ever-increasing pool of already learned words once responses to that word exceeded 80 per cent correct within the proceeding session.”

The trials ran for six weeks and by the end of it the cleverest baboon, Dan, had racked up 308 words out of more than 7,800 presented. Average success was about 75 per cent accuracy. The researchers described this as “remarkable” given the relatively small differences between one letter combination and another. The baboons had “learned to discriminate words from non-words on the basis of differences in the frequency of letter combinations”, the authors write.