{"id":815,"date":"2004-01-20T04:37:21","date_gmt":"2004-01-20T04:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=815"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:27","slug":"psychology-monkeys-fail-hard-grammar-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=815","title":{"rendered":"psychology: monkeys fail hard grammar test"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">To the dismay of many would-be Dr. Dolittles who&#8217;d  like nothing more than to talk to the animals, new research suggests  that the ensuing conversation might not be particularly sparkling. Marc  D. Hauser of Harvard University and W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University  of St. Andrews in Scotland report in the Jan. 16 <em>Science<\/em> that they have  found that cotton-top tamarin monkeys cannot  understand the complicated  rules of grammar that are key to human language. Though previous  studies have shown that the monkeys could comprehend very simple  grammatical rules, the researchers found once the words are no longer  right next to each other, such as an &#8220;If . . .  then . . .&#8221; sentence  construction, the monkeys became perplexed. Hauser and Fitch first  exposed the animals to recordings of both a simple and a more  complicated grammatical pattern  through a loudspeaker. Then the grammar  rule for each example was occasionally broken. If a monkey looked at  the loudspeaker when this happened, it was taken as evidence that it  recognized the discrepancy.  This capability, the authors write, &#8220;is one  of the crucial requirements for mastering any human language.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Discoveries column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 1\/20\/2004.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To the dismay of many would-be Dr. Dolittles who&#8217;d like nothing more than to talk to the animals, new research suggests that the ensuing conversation might not be particularly sparkling. Marc D. Hauser of Harvard University and W. Tecumseh Fitch &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=815\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}