Yes, and there’s been a lot of work with African Greys already. Irene Pepperberg and her lab have done most of the really pioneering work. They’ve shown that Greys can recognize colors, small numbers and in some cases produce very large vocabs. There’s also evidence that Grey’s sometimes overcorrect. That is, they apply complete grammatical rules to conjugate/decline words even when the words are irregular. This happens with human children as well. Thus for example, human children will frequently say “runned” when they mean “ran” or “mouses” when they mean “mice” and many similar examples. This is strong evidence that they are internalizing general rules rather than simply repeating words they’ve heard. Since Greys do the same thing, we can conclude that parrots aren’t just parroting.
The BBC appears to have at least partially withdrawn their article about the parrot in question:
Note: This story about animal communication has replaced an earlier one on this page which contained factual inaccuracies we were unable to correct. As a result, the original story is no longer in our archive. It is still visible elsewhere, via the link below:
‘Parrot oratory stuns scientists’
Yes, and there’s been a lot of work with African Greys already. Irene Pepperberg and her lab have done most of the really pioneering work. They’ve shown that Greys can recognize colors, small numbers and in some cases produce very large vocabs. There’s also evidence that Grey’s sometimes overcorrect. That is, they apply complete grammatical rules to conjugate/decline words even when the words are irregular. This happens with human children as well. Thus for example, human children will frequently say “runned” when they mean “ran” or “mouses” when they mean “mice” and many similar examples. This is strong evidence that they are internalizing general rules rather than simply repeating words they’ve heard. Since Greys do the same thing, we can conclude that parrots aren’t just parroting.
Yes, it is! I hadn’t heard that before. Is there a journal article somewhere?
I’m not aware of any journal articles for overcorrection and a quick Google search doesn’t turn any up. I’ll go bug my ornithology friends. In the meantime, here’s a BBC article that discusses the matter: http://web.archive.org/web/20060519061120/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3430481.stm . They give the example of N’kisis using “flied” for the past tense of “fly” rather than “flew.”
Edit: Fixed link. Edit: Link’s accuracy is questionable. See Mass Driver’s remarks below.
The link seems to be dead or misspelled.
Misspelled. Edited for correct link.
The BBC appears to have at least partially withdrawn their article about the parrot in question:
New BBC News Article
skeptic article about the parrot
Hmm, that’s very interesting. I think I’ve seen the overcorrection claim before but then definitely don’t have anything resembling a good citation.