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.
A baboon from the study performs a word recognition task. (Joel Fagot )
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.
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