TY - JOUR T1 - Behavioral assessment of combinatorial semantics in baboons (Papio papio). AU - Medam,Tiphaine, AU - Fagot,Joël, Y1 - 2015/10/26/ PY - 2015/05/29/received PY - 2015/10/21/revised PY - 2015/10/21/accepted PY - 2015/10/31/entrez PY - 2015/10/31/pubmed PY - 2016/12/15/medline KW - Language KW - Monkey KW - Nonhuman primate KW - Symbol KW - Word learning SP - 54 EP - 62 JF - Behavioural processes JO - Behav Processes VL - 123 N2 - 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. SN - 1872-8308 UR - https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/26515889/Behavioral_assessment_of_combinatorial_semantics_in_baboons__Papio_papio__ DB - PRIME DP - Unbound Medicine ER -