After being trained, the baboons were able to make this distinction, despite not being capable of reading. The results suggest the ability to recognize words could more closely relate to object identification than linguistic skill.
The study, completed by Dr John Grainger and Dr Joel Fagot from the Aix-Marseille University was published in the journal Science.
"It was by no means a foregone conclusion that the baboons would be able to master our word-non-word discrimination task, so we were quite excited about the simple fact that they did succeed," said Dr Grainger.
The researchers tested a group of Guinea baboons in a specially built facility at the university.
"In this research, the animals are completely free to participate, and are automatically identified by the test computers when they quit their social group to voluntarily enter one of the 10 possible test systems," explained Dr Fagot who designed the system.
Inside the test booths the baboons were presented with a computer screen that displayed either a four-letter word or a nonsensical jumble of letters.
To earn a treat from the automated system, they had to correctly touch either a plus sign to signify a non-word or an oval for a word.
Find the whole report here...
Now reading all of that I am wondering.... I do know people that could N O T tell the difference between actual words and nonsense letter combinations.
