Can squirrel monkeys learn an ABnA grammar? A re-evaluation of Ravignani et al. (2013)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Zoology
- Keywords
- grammar learning, animal cognition, squirrel monkey, habituation task
- Copyright
- © 2017 Ghirlanda
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Can squirrel monkeys learn an ABnA grammar? A re-evaluation of Ravignani et al. (2013) PeerJ Preprints 5:e2963v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2963v1
Abstract
Ravignani et al. (2013) habituated squirrel monkeys to sound sequences conforming to an ABnB grammar, then tested them for the ability to identify novel grammatical sequences as well as non-grammatical ones. Although they conclude that the monkeys "consistently recognized and generalized the sequence ABnA," the data indicate very poor generalization. Pattern grammaticality accounted for at most 6% of the variance in responding. In addition, the statistical significance of results depends on specific choices of data analysis (dichotomization of the response variable and omission of certain data points) which appear to have a weak rationale. I also suggest that the task used by Ravignani et al. (2013) may be fruitfully analyzed as an auditory sequence discrimination task that does not require specific proto-linguistic abilities.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.