Pigeons And Language

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science revealed that pigeons can learn to recognize words. Through steady training, the pigeons were able to learn how to recognize shapes and words. It took over eight months of training, but four birds were able to distinguish four letter words from non-words, such as “very” and “vrey” or words with additional letters that misspelled them. In cases like this, pigeons’ performance is more similar to humans than to baboons’ performance. Ultimately, the four pigeons learned to differentiate between 26 and 58 words. Despite the language or culture, the Visual Word Form Area of the brain initiates the ability to read. Since the written word was not developed until about 5,400 years