Study: Baboons can recognize word shapes

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webearthonline
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Study: Baboons can recognize word shapes

Post by webearthonline »

In the news,


"Study: Baboons can recognize word shapes
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Monkey see, monkey read? Baboons can reliably recognize short words in experiments, scientists reported on Thursday.

* French researchers are showing that baboons can do what is essentially the first step in reading. They can identify recurring patterns -- in English.

By Joel Fagot, AP

French researchers are showing that baboons can do what is essentially the first step in reading. They can identify recurring patterns -- in English.

French researchers are showing that baboons can do what is essentially the first step in reading. They can identify recurring patterns -- in English.
The finding points to one of the keys to human reading. Kids learn the sounds of their ABCs before learning to read, but recognizing word shapes and lengths also plays a stronger-than-suspected earlier role in literacy, the baboon results suggest.

"The baboons aren't reading; they don't attach any meaning to the words other than recognizing shapes," says psychologist Jonathan Grainger of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who led the study, published in the journal Science . "But the point is they can recognize the right ones, and ones close to the right ones."

The experiment found that six baboons could be trained to distinguish a few dozen four-letter words (one learned 308 words) from around 7,800 non-words with about 75% accuracy. Even seeing a word for the first time, the baboons, once trained, were more likely to recognize it as a word, preferring them over the nonsense ones. More remarkably, the researchers found the baboons mistook visually similar non-words for real words in exactly the same pattern as human readers.

"The really striking result is that baboons could distinguish, in a statistical sense, not only words from non-words but (they) saw them the way that human English readers do as well," says neuroscientist Charles Connor of the Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who was not part of the study. "We're seeing reading-like vision processes can occur in a species without language, and that is really surprising."

The experiment also points to visual-attention shortfalls as an explanation for dyslexia in children, says neuropsychologist Andrea Facoetti of Italy's University of Padua, rather than problems with speaking or hearing in the brain. Facoetti and colleagues Thursday reported in another journal, Current Biology, that trouble with visual tasks in 5-years-olds predicts future dyslexia, for example.

"Obviously, this is just part of the story when it comes to really learning to read," Grainger says. "We still have to teach kids what sounds go with each letter." "
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Re: Study: Baboons can recognize word shapes

Post by Alrai »

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/st ... 54213126/1
The link contains the same article posted above, but also has a short video explanation as to how the experiment was conducted.

"We're seeing reading-like vision processes can occur in a species without language, and that is really surprising." I am not a neuroscientist, but I don't see why such a concept is so surprising. The ability to read (or ability similar to reading) and the ability to develop a language are two very different challenges, no?
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