Of all the creatures on Earth, only two can produce human language: humans and birds. Of the few birds that can imitate human speech, including mynah birds, crows, and ravens, parrots are clearly the best at itthey give TED talks, speak multiple languages, and even front heavy metal bands. So why can parrots talk when our closer primate relatives cannot?
Parrots are vocal learners, meaning they grasp sounds by hearing and then imitating them. Although several other bird species can discern and repeat sounds, parrots are the pros.
Erich Jarvis, a Duke University neuroscientist and vocal learning expert, recently published a study in Plos One explaining why. Any bird thats a vocal learner has a part of the brain devoted to this, called the song system. But in parrots, the song system has two layersan inner core, common to all avian vocal learners, and an outer shell, which is unique to parrots. Jarvis thinks that this recently discovered shell is what allows parrots to be such expert mimickers (though he hasnt figured out exactly how it works yet).
But why do they copy human speech? Peer pressure, it turns out. Parrots naturally try to fit in, be it among other parrots or other people.
In the wild, parrots use their vocal prowess to share important information and fit in with the flock, says Irene Pepperberg, a research associate and part-time lecturer at Harvard. Pepperberg is best known for her work probing the intelligence of an African Grey Parrot called Alex, who lived in Pepperbergs lab for 30 years, until his death in 2007. A single bird in the wild is a dead bird; It cant look for food and look for predators at the same time, Pepperberg saysbut in a flock they can trade off responsibilities.
Parrots are even capable of learning and using varying dialects. Yellow-naped Amazon Parrots in Costa Rica, for example, have regional dialects, and when they swap regions, the transplants often pick up the local twang, Tim Wright, who studies parrot vocalization at New Mexico State University, found in his research.
So plop a parrot into a human household, and it will try to integrate itself into the situation as though the people were its flock members, says Pepperberg.
Pet parrots have all the essential conditions for picking up languagetime, inspiration, and mental ability. Wild parrots, on the other hand, lack the needed close proximity to speech. (Though wild parrots have been overheard spouting human phrases, presumably learned from escaped pet parrots, this behavior is rare.) In the wild, parrots focus on other parrots for what they want to learn, Wright says. Its only in captivity, when humans become their sources of social interaction, that they start paying attention to us. The question is, do these precocious birds know what theyre saying?
The question is, do these precocious birds know what theyre saying? For parrots, words may have some associations but not complex meanings, says Wright. But they are very attuned to the context in which we use [words], and so I think that often fools people a little bit. When a parrot says Hello; how are you? when its owner enters the room, for example, its not necessarily interested in your well being but is mimicking what it hears the owner saying when he or she comes in. In fact, a parrots understanding of how are you, is probably Oh look, someone has come into the room. Parrots are also drawn to phrases and sounds associated with excitement and commotion, Wright adds, which may be why the birds are so good at learning profanity.
With training, though, it can be a different story, says Pepperberg. She bought Alex right after she completed her PhD in 1977, and decided to train him rigorously: The bird listened and watched a pair of researchers identify and exchange simple objects (importantly, objects Alex liked). One human acted as a model for the bird, exchanging objects with the other researcher while Alex watched. They sometimes intentionally made mistakes, so the bird could see that not any random new noise mediates transfer of the objectjust its label. Only when the bird was practically falling off his perch lusting after these objects did the researchers loop him into the conversationand, if he identified an object correctly, let him play with it.
Parrots who talk know what theyre saying if they are taught appropriately, Pepperberg says. For example, a bird trained to identify favorite foods knows exactly what they mean when they ask for them. For example, Waldo, a 21-year-old African Grey Parrot who has been part of the band Hatebeak for 12 years (what started as a joke has become a successful venture), likes snacking on bananas and crackers. As drummer Blake Harrison told Vice, We got him dehydrated banana chips, and he pieced it together and called them banana crackers on his own. Its a little creepy.
By the end of his life, Pepperbergs Alex had learned to identify 50 objects, seven colors, six shapes (such as three-corner for triangle and four corner for square), and quantities up to eight. He could tell you, for instance, how many purple popsicle sticks (How many purple wood?) were on a tray of assorted objects. He could also identify things that were the same or different, as well as bigger and smaller. What stood out about Alex was not his vocabulary (at around 100 words, it was average for a parrot). Instead, it was his ability to learn and repeat concepts: For example, when researchers fed Alex cake on his birthday one year, he called it yummy bread. He also had his own special word for applebannery, cause it probably tasted a bit like a banana and looked like a big cherry, Pepperberg says.
While that might sound pretty ingenious, remember that many other animalsvocal learning or nothave sounds that they use to communicate (particularly about food, one of the most important aspects of any animals life). We likely just find parrots particularly endearing because we can understand them.
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The grammar of bird calls
Semantics, the relationship between words and meanings, is a fundamental component of human language. Scientists had long believed that animal vocalizations, in contrast to human speech, were involuntary and simply expressed the animal’s emotional state without providing any additional information. However, a wealth of research conducted in the past forty years has demonstrated that different animals have unique calls with distinct meanings.
Many bird species use different alarm calls for different predators. Japanese tits, which nest in tree cavities, have one call that causes their chicks to crouch down to avoid being pulled out of the nest by crows, and another call for tree snakes that sends the chicks jumping out of the nest entirely. Siberian jays vary their calls depending on whether a predatory hawk is seen perching, looking for prey or actively attacking and each call elicits a different response from other nearby jays. And black-capped chickadees change the number of dees in their characteristic call to indicate the relative size and threat of predators.
According to two recent studies, some birds’ vocalizations may have meaning depending on their order. This could represent a basic version of the rules governing the arrangement and combination of words and elements in human language known as syntax, though the idea is still controversial. This is demonstrated by the well-known dog bites man vs. man bites dog example.
In addition to alert calls, many bird species use recruitment calls that summon other members of their species. Both Japanese tits and southern pied babblers appear to combine alert calls with recruitment calls to create a sort of call to arms, gathering their compatriots into a mob to harass and chase off a predator. When the birds hear this call, they approach the caller while scanning for danger.
Researchers at Kyoto University, led by ethologist Toshitaka Suzuki, found that the Japanese tits are affected by the sequence in which the combined calls are made. An artificially reversed “recruitment alert” call did not cause the same level of mobbing response as when Suzuki’s team played a recorded “alert recruitment” combo to wild tits. The scientists devised a cunning method to test this theory, though it could just as easily be explained by the fact that the birds responded to the combined alert recruitment call as their own signal without understanding the components of the combination.
Japanese tits are also able to recognize and react to the unique recruitment calls made by willow tits in the wild. The Japanese tits reacted with the same combined scanning and approaching behavior when Suzuki’s team combined the willow tit recruitment call and the Japanese tit alert call, but only if the calls were placed in the proper alert recruitment order.
These results demonstrate a new parallel between animal communication systems and human language, Suzuki and colleagues wrote in Current Biology in 2017.
But behavioral neuroscientist Adam Fishbein of the University of California, San Diego says it depends on how one interprets the call combinations of the tits and babblers in relation to discussions of human language, which involves more complex sequences.
According to Fishbein, “you would get a whole bunch of different combinations of things if they were doing something more like language.” Its such a restricted system within the birds. .
According to Fishbein’s own research using zebra finch song, birds may not value syntax as highly as humans do. He remarks, “It seems like people are trying to impose this human conception of communication on what the birds are doing.”
Birdsong often follows typical note, syllable, and motif sequences and patterns, and it can be extremely complex. As a result, singing birds may be a more accurate representation of human language than tits’ alert and recruitment calls. Birdsong has parts that sound to the human ear like word syllables, so it’s natural to assume that the message depends on the order in which those parts appear. However, it may surprise you to learn that we have very little knowledge of how bird ear perception works with birdsong sequences. According to Fishbein’s research, humans may not always perceive the same sounds that birds do when they sing.
For his graduate work at the University of Maryland, Fishbein studied zebra finches that had been trained to press a button when they heard a change in sounds played to them. When the birds correctly identified a change, pressing the button got them a food reward. If they guessed wrong, the lights in their enclosure went off briefly. Fishbein tested what differences the birds are actually able to decipher, helping scientists understand what aspects of birdsong are important to the birds.
In one experiment, Fishbein and his associates repeatedly played the finches’ typical song at predetermined intervals before interspersing a syllable-rearranged version of the song. Although it is obvious to humans that something has changed, the birds’ ability to recognize the shuffled sequence was surprisingly poor.
The birds performed much better at another test Fishbein gave them. Within each song syllable, there are higher-frequency details called temporal fine structure that may be something like what humans perceive as timbre or tone quality. When the scientists messed with the songs fine structure by playing one of the syllables backwards, the finches were exceedingly good at catching it.
They’re significantly more adept at hearing this aspect of sound than humans are, according to Fishbein. Therefore, when we merely listen to birdsong informally, we may not be tapping into this level of sound that they are. .
As with much scientific research, our comprehension of what birds hear and what matters to them is constrained by what we hear, and in this case, statistical analyses employed to parse birdsong, according to linguist Juan Uriagereka, who collaborated with Fishbein at the University of Maryland. “We had no idea what the units they were merging were ten years ago,” he claims. “And naturally, it’s our estimation as to what the units are, right?”
Despite the fact that male zebra finches only learn one song, researchers have discovered that there are differences in the temporal fine structure of different renditions of the same song, suggesting that the birds may have a far more complex communication system than previously thought. According to Fishbein, “it’s possible that the individual elements hold the majority of the meaning, so their arrangement may not have as much of an impact on meaning as it would otherwise.” .
While that might sound pretty ingenious, remember that many other animalsvocal learning or nothave sounds that they use to communicate (particularly about food, one of the most important aspects of any animals life). We likely just find parrots particularly endearing because we can understand them.
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Pet parrots have all the essential conditions for picking up languagetime, inspiration, and mental ability. Wild parrots, on the other hand, lack the needed close proximity to speech. (Though wild parrots have been overheard spouting human phrases, presumably learned from escaped pet parrots, this behavior is rare.) In the wild, parrots focus on other parrots for what they want to learn, Wright says. Its only in captivity, when humans become their sources of social interaction, that they start paying attention to us. The question is, do these precocious birds know what theyre saying?
Parrots are even capable of learning and using varying dialects. Yellow-naped Amazon Parrots in Costa Rica, for example, have regional dialects, and when they swap regions, the transplants often pick up the local twang, Tim Wright, who studies parrot vocalization at New Mexico State University, found in his research.
Pepperberg’s Alex was able to recognize fifty objects, seven colors, six shapes (like triangles and squares), and quantities up to eight by the time he passed away. For example, he could ask you, “How many purple wood?” and he would know how many purple popsicle sticks were on a tray of random items. In addition, he was able to distinguish between objects that were “bigger” and “smaller” as well as “same” and “different.” Alex’s vocabulary, which was average for a parrot at about 100 words, was not what made him stand out. Rather, it was his capacity for concept learning and repetition. For instance, when researchers gave Alex cake for his birthday one year, he referred to it as “yummy bread.” Additionally, he coined the term “bannery” for apples because they “probably tasted a bit like a banana and looked like a big cherry,” according to Pepperberg.