title: Orthographic processing in baboons (Papio papio).
abstract: Skilled readers use information about which letters are where in a word (orthographic information) in order to access the sounds and meanings of printed words. We asked whether efficient processing of orthographic information could be achieved in the absence of prior language knowledge. To do so, we trained baboons to discriminate English words from nonsense combinations of letters that resembled real words. The results revealed that the baboons were using orthographic information in order to efficiently discriminate words from letter strings that were not words. Our results demonstrate that basic orthographic processing skills can be acquired in the absence of preexisting linguistic representations.
authors.affiliation: CNRS and Aix-Marseille University Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Fédération de Recherche 3C, Brain and Language Research Institute, Aix-Marseille University and CNRS, Marseille, France. jonathan.grainger@univ-amu.fr
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grainger
authors.forename: Stéphane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dufau
authors.forename: Marie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Montant
authors.forename: Johannes C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Ziegler
authors.forename: Joël
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fagot
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D008037:Linguistics; D008606:Mental Processes; D048531:Papio papio; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014825:Vocabulary