Soon they’ll be blogging
According to the Herald, “Baboons learn to tell real words from gibberish”, which would put them ahead of some politicians and academics. The story describes
… new research that shows baboons are able to pick up the first step in reading – identifying recurring patterns and determining which four-letter combinations are words and which are gobbledygook.
Here’s the press release, and the scientific paper. After being trained with a bunch of real and made-up words with four letters (no, not the ones you’re thinking of), the baboons could classify new four-letter combinations with about 75% accuracy, compared to 50% for pure chance.
The scientists were a bit more restrained, saying that the baboons were probably looking at which two-letter pairs appeared more frequently in the real words. In fact, as Mark Liberman describes at Language Log, it was probably even simpler than that. If the baboons just recognised the shapes of individual letters, that would be enough for them to get 75% accuracy. If they were really doing anything more sophisticated they should be doing much, much better than 75% accuracy.
One thing I don’t understand, though, is why French psychologists would try to teach the baboons to recognise English words.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
13 years ago
At a guess, French researchers would use English words/nonsense so that their research had a greater chance of being published and read in the English speaking world.
English also doesn’t need the diacritical marks which French uses. Those accents might be seen to make the difference between sense and nonsense four letter combinations. That’s an extra complication which can be avoided by using English.
13 years ago
Now if only someone could teach journalists at the Herald to recognise gibberish perhaps then they wouldn’t publish so many poor press releases.
13 years ago