I am teaching my princess parrot to recognise objects and colours (with small wicker balls she likes to play with already) to see if I can mimic the experiments with Alex the African Grey parrot. Ultimately I want to raise awareness of these creatures because they are considered "aloof aviary birds" to help stop the aviary trade, but she's genuinely the smartest parrot I've ever owned. She really likes green because it sounds like her flock call. I'm trying to stay still when I do it so I don't prime her like Clever Hans the horse (which desu still shows horses are quite intelligent). Pic related was me just starting out with green only.She can pick green every time and blue most of the time when I ask, even when switching balls, and she's already making soft vocalisations. Do you guys believe there is validity to the notion parrots can understand language/communicate using human language?
>>5170414They have spindle neurons so they have some hardware we associate with language learning and comprehension. But they have a diffent cortex and stuff like pitch perfect hearing so to them maybe the same word with slightly diffent pitch or intonation is entirely different to them.Some song birds even have something like proto language with words for things like snake.
>>5170444>like pitch perfect hearing so to them maybe the same word with slightly diffent pitch or intonation is entirely different to them.Oh so like the Japanese.
>>5170462That would be more like Chinese Japanese is more like long and short syllables make differnt words. Chinese is very pitch sensitive and Japanese is very timing sensitive.
>>5170414Check out Apollo, his owners Dalton and Tori are also using Alex as a basis for their own teachings and Apollo currently has the record for smartest bird.
>>5170414i think all animals can understand different vocalizations mean different things if trained well enough, you can train a dog to retrieve a certain type of item for a specific sound, that doesnt mean it understands what the word is, it just knows to retrieve that type of item when you make that sound, or that sound refers to that item
