Do Parrots Really Known Language?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Derek Levin. I’m calling from Heartland, Vermont.

Heartland, Vermont. Welcome to the show. What’s up? What’s on your mind?

I have a 25-year-old African gray parrot, and they’re fairly well known for being pretty vociferous and having a lot of words.

Oh, yeah.

They make a lot of sounds, too.

And she disappeared at one point.

She got out of her cage outside, and she flew off.

And I eventually did find her.

And one of the reasons I found her was because she’d gone about a quarter of a mile away from home, and I was out calling for her.

And finally, she decided to answer.

This was a day after she disappeared.

And the answer was, got a grape?

Now, the thing that brought up the subject here, as far as I’m concerned, was I started thinking a while back about what is a word and what could reasonably be considered a word.

And so when a lot of people, I put out that she was missing on our local listserv, and a lot of people responded.

And inevitably, when somebody hears that I have a parrot, one of the first things they say is, what does she speak?

And if so, what does she say, and how many words does she have?

And so getting to this question about how many words does she have, I decided to start writing them down to see if I could come up with a number.

And then that’s when the question really occurred to me, what exactly is the word?

I mean, there are things that she does that are clearly communication with me, and I understand them perfectly, and other people around me understand them perfectly.

But I can assure you they’re not in the lexicon.

But the basic question is, what is the word?

What is a word in this relationship that you have with the bird?

And what’s the bird’s name?

Trouble.

Trouble.

Wonderful.

Derek and Trouble.

I might respond with the question that I would ask, because I don’t think what is a word is the question here.

I think the question might be, does this bird have a language?

Because there we can get a little more precise.

The bird definitely knows words, for sure.

Right.

But the bird knows how to understand them and how to speak them.

But my understanding is that birds like this don’t have language because they require two things to have language.

One is they need to have a kind of two-way communication known as recursion.

So they need to have basically ideas embedded in ideas.

So you might say the car you want to buy is the car Sheldon sold to Sonia, right?

And an animal that has some kind of communication, including Coco the gorilla, parrots, dogs, that can hear humans and respond to human commands, don’t understand those kinds of recursive statements.

They can’t understand that idea embedded in an idea or the idea that refers to another idea.

They also usually have a problem with reference, where, for example, we use pronouns in place of other people’s names in order to not have to say their name over and over.

And animals tend to have a real problem with that.

What they need is gestures pointing to the person, or they need the person’s name, or they need the person to be present.

Another thing that probably is missing here that shows that this bird doesn’t have language is there must be generalization.

And by generalization, I mean widely different things that humans would classify under the same category need to be understood as that same category by the creature.

So a real common example when this is discussed in language classes is what is a ball?

Is a ball a golf ball?

Is it a basketball?

Would an animal understand that a bowling ball or a ping pong ball or a ball that is red versus a ball that has stripes, that all of these are balls, and usually animals don’t understand that.

Okay, if I may, using a very simple concept here, she will frequently, when I uncover her in the morning, because I usually cover her, she will start off fairly quickly with, may I have breakfast, please?

Okay, and she might continue to use that same expression.

However, after a while, she gets a little frustrated, and she says, may I have a grape?

May I have an apple?

You know, a series of kinds of food where she clearly knows that the foods are part of breakfast.

Right, because she gets them the first part of the day shortly after you take it off.

I mean, it’s really easy to look at animals’ conditioned behavior and think that we’re seeing language there.

What we are seeing is communication.

She is definitely communicating, but it isn’t language in the way that humans have language.

Yeah, and I would say that may I have a is not four words either.

It’s almost like one.

She’s learning bunched phrases, bunched words together.

She’s learning clusters.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you.

Really?

Yeah, they’re pretty.

I’m an English teacher, so I really do understand part of this anyway, although you’re way over my head.

But they’re pretty well connected.

It’s pretty much of an interchange.

What you’re thinking, I’m afraid, and this is people train their animals.

Right. And the animals respond to the training.

OK. In my case, I just live with this bird.

I really don’t make that much effort to train her.

She picks up things on her own and she picks up things from different people.

She actually speaks in different people’s voices sometimes.

She alters phrases quite a bit.

And she tries out different possibilities in order to get to a particular concept.

So I think it’s a little more sophisticated than you’re giving credit to, just in terms of the fact that most people, I think, train their animal by offering them food or something of that nature.

And then when they respond correctly, quote, unquote, they give them a reward of food.

I’ve never done that.

But you do.

You do.

You feed her.

You care for her.

I mean, the relationship that you have might not be planned and organized training, but it is nonetheless the kind of stimulus and response.

It is very much you do something, she understands how that can benefit her, and she tries to get you to do that thing again for her.

Right?

So that is the relationship of the caretaker, the person, and the animal.

It’s very much a two-way street.

What I’m looking for here would be evidence that you could, say, show her a guava and that she could recognize that as a fruit and say that, give me that fruit, or I want fruit.

Well, I think she certainly could do that if she knew what a guava was.

Well, there we go.

That’s what I’m saying.

A human would look at the guava and immediately say, oh, I recognize that even though I’ve never seen it before.

That looks like a fruit to me.

I want that fruit.

And usually the animals can’t do that consistently time after time.

They have to be taught that.

Anyway, it sounds like what you’ve got there is a wonderful bird.

And they have a really long life, right?

Yeah, they say they’re 60 to 70.

That’s incredible.

Really?

And it sounds like you’ve got a great human-animal relationship there, something that all of us could envy.

She’s around 25 now.

You’ve had her whole life?

Pretty much, yeah.

Does she listen to the show?

She doesn’t listen to this one.

She did a while back.

She used to like Walker, Texas Ranger.

Nice.

Yeah?

Did she pick up any vocabulary from Walker, Texas Ranger?

Well, that was the problem.

There was an advertisement on the show, you know, whatever.

When it wasn’t showing for Walker, Texas Ranger, it said, Walker, Texas Ranger.

And she picked that up.

But here’s the thing that was very interesting, and I didn’t do this somehow or another.

She changed it from walker to squawker.

Oh, nice.

That’s outstanding.

Derek, Trouble sounds like a lot of fun.

And if you get a chance to send us a picture of Trouble, I’d love to see the bird.

Okay.

I’ll do that.

And I want to thank you.

Actually, I’ve got a little video of her dancing.

Oh, nice.

Excellent.

Even better.

I want to thank you for taking all your time to explain this great animal to us.

It really sounds like a wonderful creature.

Thank you. Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

I guess the thing I should have told Derek is that humans, even though we do have language,

Which is this really magnificent trick that no other animal seems to be able to pull off.

We do fall back on nonverbal communication and other kinds of getting our point across without having to put the full resources of language to use.

I’m nodding my head.

Yeah, there we go.

So it’s the body, it’s the face.

Sometimes it’s silence.

We communicate in a lot of ways.

And so what is happening between him and his bird is very similar to what happens to him and other human beings.

They’re both getting their message across to the other person without language.

It’s not that language is the only way to tell people things.

It’s just that it’s a far more sophisticated form of telling people things or telling creatures things.

Yeah, more complicated for sure.

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