Monkey See, Monkey Do. Monkey Read?

Erin Loury, via a kind reader:

Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.

The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. "We're actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables," says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.

Mark Seidenberg emails:

here's what you need to know:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3912

Basically, the study shows nothing of any interest about reading. it shows that baboons could pick up on differences in letter frequencies between word and nonword stimuli that allowed to tell them apart about 75% of the time.

This is trivial compared to what a reader knows about the properties of written English.

the paper is here:

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6078/245.full

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 24, 2012 2:56 AM
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