Alex, the Talking Parrot

Parrots that are trained to talk often say silly things like "Polly want a cracker." Although these birds have learned to copy the sounds that make up the words, they don't really know what they're saying. But there is one parrot who speaks more than a hundred words and actually understands their meanings. He is an African gray parrot named Alex.

Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a scientist at the University of Arizona, has worked with Alex for nineteen years. Teaching Alex to speak and understand wasn't easy at first. He had to learn one word at a time. Irene and an assistant would teach Alex by showing him what a word meant. Irene would hold up an object, saying "What's this?" Her human partner would give the word—"button", for example—while Alex watched. Irene would praise her partner, then ask Alex the name for the object. When he got it right, Irene would praise him and give him the object to play with as a reward. It took Alex many weeks to learn his first word. After that, each new word became easier and easier for him.

Why did Irene spend so much time getting a parrot to talk? Scientists like Irene are interested in discovering how intelligent animals are and how their brains work. But studying animal intelligence has always been difficult, partly because animals haven't been able to communicate clearly with humans. Teaching Alex to speak words that he understands has let Irene talk to him directly. She can ask him questions, and he can answer them in English. In this way, Irene is finding out what sorts of things Alex's brain can do. She has found that parrots are much smarter than scientists used to think. The word "birdbrain", which means someone who isn't very smart, certainly doesn't apply to Alex.

Alex can identify over forty kinds of objects, five different shapes, five materials, and seven colors, and he can use his knowledge to solve problems and answer questions. For example, from a group of objects, he can pick out the number of things of a certain color, up to the number six. He can also make comparisons, such as bigger or smaller and same or different, between objects.

Alex has shown us that birds like parrots can understand categories such as shape, color, and size. They can solve problems and recognize numbers. Before Alex came along, scientists did not believe that animals with such small brains could do these things.