The answer is no, but almost. A team of researchers from the University of Marseille (France) has succeeded in getting a group of baboons to recognize English words with astonishing accuracy. The results reveal that visual word recognition can be learned without the need to know spoken language.
During the month and a half that the training lasted, the baboons learned to identify words from more than 7,000 nonsense letter sequences. As a result, the monkeys recognized words with 75 percent accuracy , the researchers explain in their work published in Science . Also, like humans, baboons made more misidentifications when the spurious sequences featured combinations of letters common to real words. For example, a higher percentage of errors was found in sequences that contained the “th” pair, very common in English, than in those that contained the “ht” sequence.
These results yield two important conclusions. The first, that it is possible to recognize words without having any idea of what they really sound like . And the second, that baboons not only get information from the letters, but the relationships between them also give them clues. “This suggests a connection with some kind of ancestral ability that is not linguistic, but is related to the ability to recognize objects,” explains Jonathan Grainger, one of the authors.
Does this mean that monkeys could one day read? “One of our projects is to train baboons to associate words with some kind of meaning,” explains Grainger. “That would be the next step, but it will be excessively complicated,” he clarifies. The image of a monkey comfortably reading the newspaper on the sofa is still a long way from coming true.
