By Bruce Bower
Baboons hang out in the bush, not in bookstores. Yet these avid nonreaders can learn to tell written, real words from nonsense words, a new study finds.
That surprising achievement is not the same as reading, say psychologist Jonathan Grainger of the University of Aix-Marseille in France and his colleagues: Baboons tested in the new study didn’t attach meanings to words. Critically, though, these animals demonstrated that the roots of deciphering alphabetic script lie in brain functions that have nothing to do with language, Grainger’s team reports in the April 13 Science.
“We think our baboons learned to distinguish between specific combinations of letters that mostly appear in words versus combinations of letters that mostly appear in nonwords,” Grainger says.