Chapter 13 - Grey parrots: Learning and using speech

Abstract

This chapter briefly describes some of the findings on the cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. Parrots and humans, like songbirds, share aspects of sound production. Grey parrots engage in considerable sound play, including phonetic “babbling” and recombination, and use such abilities to construct new speech patterns from existing ones; they appear to represent their labels acoustically as humans do, and develop phonetic categories. Many studies of the acquisition of referential vocal communication by parrots may ultimately provoke more questions than answers. How do creatures so phylogenetically distant from humans, as parrots learn to pick up on human behavior and learn to speak meaningfully, both in training and in less structured social situations? Are such skills a part of a rich convergent evolution in a wide variety of social creatures, adaptable to the particular social circumstances in which they find themselves? Could it be that other social creatures than ourselves are capable of more than we expect? Only an open mind on the part of researchers and intensive investigative study will answer these questions. Parrots present us with a unique opportunity to re-examine some of our beliefs, prejudices, and expectations about avian abilities.