[Laura Heidy-Halberstein]

As the original, once and former "Monkey Girl," I absolutely love this story!

Just think of the avenues opened up if this research turns out to be true......

(Plus, all joking aside, it's such an intriguing discovery, isn't it?)

There is 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 just gobbledygook.

In 300,000 tests, the six baboons distinguished between real and fake words about three-out-of-four times, according to the study published in Thursday's journal Science.

The 4-year-old Dan, (no relation) the star of the bunch and about the equivalent age of a human teenager, got 80 percent of the words right and learned 308 four-letter words.

The key is that these animals not only learned by trial and error which letter combinations were correct, but they also noticed which letters tend to go together to form real words, such as SH but not FX, said Grainger. So even when new words were sprung on them, they did a better job at figuring out which were real.

Grainger said a pre-existing capacity in the brain may allow them to recognize patterns and objects, and perhaps that's how we humans also first learn to read.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...6pLid%3D151672