[LINK] "Reading without understanding: baboons can tell real English words from fake ones"

[rfmcdonald]

I'm not sure about the exact import of Ed Yong's post at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The ability of other primates--primates which do not make use of language, at least not human-style spoken language--to determine the deep patterns of phonemes and syllables in specific languages does imply both rather impressive levels of intelligence among baboons in at least the domain of pattern recognition and another instance of humans' over-estimating their capabilities relative their peers.

‘Wasp’ is an English word, but ‘telk’ is not. You and I know this because we speak English. But in a French laboratory, six baboons have also learned to tell the difference between genuine English words, and nonsense ones. They can sort their wasps from their telks, even though they have no idea that the former means a stinging insect and the latter means nothing. They don’t understand the language, but can ‘read’ nonetheless.

At its most basic level, reading is about recognising patterns. We look at letters (or other symbols) and identify them based on their number, position and angles of lines. This is a trivial task, and one that doesn’t require any language. Letters are no different to any other object in our environment that we can recognise. A pigeon can be trained to do discriminate between letters.

The next step is harder. We unite letters into words by looking at their positions relative to one another. This is called “orthographic processing”. It’s the stage where, according to general consensus, language kicks in. As we see clusters of letters, we think about the sounds they represent and we read the word aloud in our heads. But Jonathan Grainger from Aix-Marseille University has shown that orthographic processing can happen without any knowledge of language, or how words are meant to sound.

Grainger trained baboons to recognise English words, and tell them apart from very similar nonsense words. The monkeys learned quickly, and could even categorise words they had never seen before. They weren’t anglophiles by any stretch. Instead, their abilities suggest that the act of reading words is just a more advanced version of the pattern-recognition skill that lets us identify letters. It’s a skill that was there long before the first human had scrawled the first letter.

[. . .]

None of the six baboons had seen words or letters before. But over a month and a half, and thousands of trials, all of them learned to distinguish words from non-words with around 75 per cent accuracy (50 per cent would be pure guesswork). The most successful of them – Dan – built up a vocabulary of 308 words.

Their achievement is remarkable, not least because the non-words were very similar to the actual ones. Rather than obvious fakes like ‘qzxc’, they all contained pairs of letters that occur in real words, although they veered towards rarer combinations. And the monkeys weren’t just memorising the words. They were still more likely to pick a set of letters they had never seen before, if it was an actual English word.

Grainger thinks that the baboons learned to tell the real words from the fakes by using the frequencies of letter combinations within them. They learned which combinations were most likely to be found in real words, and made their choices accordingly. They had gleaned the stats of English, without any knowledge of the language itself.

Stanislas Deheane, one of the leading figures in the science of reading, thinks that the study is “extraordinarily exciting”. He says, “It fits very nicely with my own research, which suggests that reading relies, in part, on learning the purely visual statistics of letters and their combinations.”