Baboons get tasty treats and teach us about the origins of reading

Baboons can recognize written words, study finds: The monkeys don't assign meaning to them, but learn what letter combinations are common to real words, the study authors say.

Baboons don't read, don't speak and perhaps can't understand language at all. But scientists have found that they can learn to recognize writing on a computer screen, identifying correctly most of the time which combinations of letters are words ("done," "vast") and which are not ("telk," "virt").

The discovery may help explain how reading evolved in humans, researchers said, bolstering a theory that the skill first arose from animals' ability to distinguish objects, rather than from the uniquely human demands of verbal communication.

"Maybe we use letters to read words because we're mimicking what we do with everyday objects," said Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at the National Center for Scientific Research and Aix-Marseille University in France and lead author of an article about the research published Thursday in the journal Science.

The lead researcher says:

It is not obvious that people would necessarily perform better in such an experiment, he said.

The baboons performed their tasks "quite happily," apparently motivated by the wheat snack and, Grainger believes, something akin to enjoyment.

"It could be like a video game for them," he mused.

He said he was skeptical that humans could be persuaded so easily to take the time to learn a new alphabet.

It sounded a bit cramped to me, an 82-by-115-foot enclosure, especially to share with other baboons, but that is 9,430 square feet, which is respectably big, even by human standards. The baboons were allowed to come and go as they pleased to play the game and get a tasty treat, although the little booth they show in the article's pictures is a little claustrophobic looking for me, but I don't like to be closed in.

One of the things they mentioned made a lot of sense to me was that 'dyslexia might be more of a visual processing disorder than a problem matching sounds and letters'. I agree, based on how someone with whom I took Hebrew who is dyslexic had to memorise each and every word, rather than going with the pattern of three (generally) letters in a root and prefixes, suffixes, and other changes. For most of us, it's a matter of recognising a pattern, and we can predict it given the base word and the part of speech. This works the same in other languages that conjugate and decline, but it's more complex in Hebrew, I think. I was horrified when I learned he was having to memorise not only every word, but every form of the word. On the other hand, his Hebrew has always been stronger than mine, as is his Greek. (And I think he's gaining on me in Latin; I'm getting rusty.)