期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2019
卷号：116
期号：30
页码：14926-14930
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1907023116
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Using a pattern extraction task, we show that baboons, like humans, have a learning bias that helps them discover connected patterns more easily than disconnected ones—i.e., they favor rules like “contains between 40% and 80% red” over rules like “contains around 30% red or 100% red.” The task was made as similar as possible to a task previously run on humans, which was argued to reveal a bias that is responsible for shaping the lexicons of human languages, both content words (nouns and adjectives) and logical words (quantifiers). The current baboon result thus suggests that the cognitive roots responsible for regularities across the content and logical lexicons of human languages are present in a similar form in other species.
关键词：connectedness ; human languages and their lexicons ; primate semantics
