In the experiment, pigeons were trained to peck four-letter English words as they came up on a screen, or to instead peck a symbol when a four-letter non-word, such as "URSP" was displayed. The researchers added words one by one with the four pigeons in the study eventually building vocabularies ranging from 26 to 58 words and over 8000 non-words.
To check whether the pigeons were learning to distinguish words from non-words rather than merely memorising them, the researchers introduced words the birds had never seen before. The pigeons correctly identified the new words as words at a rate significantly above chance. The researchers found that pigeons' performance was on a par with that previously reported in baboons for this type of complex task.
http://phys.org/news/2016-09-pigeons-distinguish-real-words-non-words.html
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