Medam Tiphaine, Fagot Joël
Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, Université d'Aix-Marseille, CNRS, Fédération de recherche 3C, 3 Place Victor Hugo, Bât. 9, Case D, 13331 Marseille cedex, France.
Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, Université d'Aix-Marseille, CNRS, Fédération de recherche 3C, 3 Place Victor Hugo, Bât. 9, Case D, 13331 Marseille cedex, France.
Behav Processes. 2016 Feb;123:54-62. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2015.10.016. Epub 2015 Oct 26.
Combinatorial semantics is a core property of human language whose mechanisms remain poorly known. This study used computerized tasks with touch screens to investigate whether baboons (Papio papio) can understand the combination of shape and color labels in order to designate their corresponding colored shape. The baboons were trained either directly with label-pairs (Experiment 1) or with individual shape and color labels (Experiment 2), before being tested with novel compound labels from which they had to identify the referent. Compound labels understanding was found in one out of seven baboons tested in Experiment 1. Quite surprisingly, none of the 11 baboons showed this capacity in Experiment 2. We discuss several aspects of our protocols which could explain this difference between our two experiments, as well as the significance of our findings for language studies in animals and children.
组合语义是人类语言的核心属性，但其机制仍鲜为人知。本研究使用触摸屏计算机任务来调查狒狒（巴氏狒狒）是否能够理解形状和颜色标签的组合，以便指定其相应的彩色形状。在使用新的复合标签进行测试以识别所指对象之前，狒狒要么直接接受标签对训练（实验1），要么接受单个形状和颜色标签训练（实验2）。在实验1测试的七只狒狒中，有一只表现出对复合标签的理解。相当令人惊讶的是，在实验2的11只狒狒中，没有一只表现出这种能力。我们讨论了实验方案的几个方面，这些方面可以解释我们两个实验之间的差异，以及我们的发现对动物和儿童语言研究的意义。
