CAMBODIA'S "jungle woman'', whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has begun speaking normally instead of making animal-type noises, her father said.

Rochom P'ngieng, now 28, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600km northeast of the capital Phnom Penh.

In early 2007 the woman was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer.

She was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging on the ground for pieces of dried rice.

She could not utter a word of any intelligible language, instead making what Sal Lou, the man who says he is her father, calls "animal noises.''

Cambodians described her as "jungle woman'' and "half-animal girl'' and since rejoining society Rochom P'ngieng has battled bouts of illness and was put in hospital in October after refusing food.

But Sal Lou said late yesterday that this month his daughter had started to understand Cambodia's Khmer language and could even speak the language of his ethnic Phnong tribe.

"She is becoming a normal human being like others. She has been starting to speak out now - she speaks the language of Phnong,'' Sal Lou said.

"She can ask for food, water and so on when she feels hungry,'' he said.

The apparent breakthrough happened after Rochom P'ngieng's hospitalisation, when doctors gave her injections to treat a nervous illness for a few days, Sal Lou said.

"She is very gentle and I am very happy with her progress,'' he said adding that her condition appears to be improving from day to day.

Sal Lou said his daughter had stopped trying to flee into the jungle as she had in the past.

"Even though we tried to take her into jungle, she wanted to stay at home,'' he said, adding that she is able to eat food now.

The jungles of Ratanakkiri - some of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia - are known to have held hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past.

In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they supported.

