Baboons Appear to Recognize Words From Gibberish While baboons can't read, they can tell the difference between real English words and nonsensical ones, a new study reports. "They are using information about letters and the relation between letters to perform the task without any kind of linguistic training," said Jonathan Grainger, a psychologist at the French Center for National Research and at Aix-Marseille University in France who was the study's first author. Dr. Grainger and his colleagues worked with six baboons that were given free access to touch-screen computers, which displayed four-letter sequences. If a baboon tapped the screen when the sequence was a real word, it received a treat. "The animal realizes what to do in order to get a reward," Dr. Grainger said. "And they remember the words; they didn't forget them." In one case, a baboon was able to learn more than 300 words. "We don't know how many they could have learned if we kept going," he said. And the baboons are not simply memorizing the words as images, he added. After several thousand trials, the researchers presented the animals with new words. The baboons were often able to correctly identify real words "without ever having seen them before," Dr. Grainger said. It may be that baboons are processing letters, and specific combinations of letters, in the same way humans do in the first stage of the reading process. "When children first learn to read, we encourage them to use the letter-level information, and to use that information to sound out the word," Dr. Grainger said. He and his colleagues hope to continue their study to explore the potential of reading in other primate species, and to better understand the semantics of human reading. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Science.