Do parrots understand the words they speak?

November 28, 2015 By Marc Morrone   petxperts2@aol.com

Irene Pepperberg has conducted research into the cognitive communication of African grey parrots. (Credit: Dreamstime)

Q: Our African grey parrot is now 3 years old, and he is as good a talking bird as we were told he would be when we bought him. Our question: How much does he actually understand when he speaks? We have read a lot on the subject, and there seems to be quite a bit of conflicting information. -- Grace Lamb, Commack

A: Up until 20 years ago, most of what you read about bird communication was anecdotal. But there has since been a lot of laboratory research performed by Irene Pepperberg in a scientific manner with her African Grey parrots. Everyone who has kept parrots as pets has a lot of stories about what their birds say and when they say them, and Pepperberg has duplicated most of those situations in her research.

For example, my scarlet macaw, Harry, lives in my pet store, and when the store phone rings, he says “Parrots of the World,” as that is how we answer the phone. This is cute but not earth-shattering — it is just one sound that is made when a particular event happens, i.e., the phone ringing.

Harry also says “Marc” whenever I walk in the room and he sees me, and he must have learned to do that just by watching what other humans do when they see me. I always thought that such observational learning was pretty clever of Harry until I read Pepperberg’s work and saw that one of her experiments was to have two humans talk to each other in front of her grey parrot, Alex. Alex would learn to identify an object they were holding by just watching and listening to the two humans.

So, yes, a bird can identify objects, events and sounds with spoken words, but it seems that hard for them to use a spoken word to identify an idea. If Harry wanted me when I wasn’t in the room, he would never say my name; he only says it when he actually sees me.

The kind of communicating that parrots do with us is no different, actually, than what our other pets do. When a cat goes to the refrigerator and meows at us, or a dog scratches at the door and then turns its head to you and barks, or a rabbit sits in front of the door to its cage and stamps its foot — these are all animals communicating ideas to us and not responding to a stimulus. They are just not doing it in our English language.