Non-reading baboons can learn to distinguish written real words from nonsense words. For example, the baboons could learn to recognize words such as done and vast and distinguish them from nonsense words such as dran and virt. Individuals learned to recognize between 81 and 308 words that they distinguished from more than 7000 nonsense words. They were accurate about 75% of the time. Jonathan Grainger of the University of Aix-Marseille and his colleagues discovered this cognitive skill but note that the baboons did not attach meaning to the words and that their ability to distinguish real words from nonsense words is not the same as reading.
So, why the keen interest in this recent research? Basically, the baboons "demonstrated that the roots of deciphering alphabetic script lie in brain functions that have nothing to do with language ... “ According to Grainger, "We think our baboons learned to distinguish between specific combinations of letters that mostly appear in words versus combinations of letters that mostly appear in nonwords ..." If he's right, this finding shows that reading is not dependent on knowledge about spoken language, and this is a big deal because it suggests that "reading initially taps into brain regions that recognize different objects by sight and that evolved in all primates. The baboons in the study drew on this capacity to track pairs of letters that distinguish real from bogus words. That knowledge enabled the monkeys to learn dozens of four-letter English words and to tell whether new four-letter sequences qualified as words or not." So, the early stages of learning to read involve the visual recognition of letters and how they're combined rather than knowledge about spoken language.
Recognizing visual word forms is a key component of literacy and these data provide the first animal model. The results of this study are also important because two baboons had difficulty distinguishing real words from nonsense words. Grainger notes, “Understanding what determines how well a baboon performs on our discrimination task might offer some insights into a possibly visual component of reading deficits in certain dyslexic children ...”
Once again, we learn that we are not alone in demonstrating some fascinating and sophisticated cognitive skills.