I know they’re just mimicking words and attach no meaning to them but can someone explain why they’re not able to attach meaning to them and form sentences in the way that humans do? I guess the wider question is why humans can’t communicate with animals.
In: Biology
They mimic sounds–all kinds of sounds, including speech, but also things like a car honk, a cat’s meow, your alarm clock. To them, words are just another sound that they can mimic quite faithfully.
But even though the words are just mimicked sounds, that doesn’t stop the birds, who are quite intelligent, from linking the sounds to concepts or objects. They can connect the sound of the meow to the cat; they can connect the word “goodnight” to the fact that you are turning out the lights.
A famous African gray parrot named Alex was able to learn quite a few words and use them in a functional way. He could, for example, count objects and name colors. You could show him five green blocks and ask him what color they were, and he would reply with, “Green”, but if you asked him how many, he would say, “Five”. That means that Alex was able to connect words not just to objects, but to abstract qualities of objects.
Parrots don’t quite use language the way we do, but as social birds, they need to communicate with one another a good deal. In the wild, they learn sounds from each other, and even have “names”–strings of sounds connected only with a particular individual. The flexibility of their songs and the way they can mimic sounds from one another makes it possible for them to use a very simple “language” that seems to consist of sounds that they make in response to objects, individuals, and circumstances.
Humans use language in a much more complex way. Instead of just talking about what’s around us right now, we can talk about the future, the past, things that might be or could be or won’t be. We can talk about what we’re thinking, summarize things and draw conclusions, and even talk about the concept of metacognition (that is, thinking about thinking). What parrots do, we can do at a much more advanced level, sort of the way a kindergartener’s “one and one is two” is much simpler, but the same concept, as a high-schooler’s algebra class.
They can absolutely have a conversation, but their native repetition is just repetition with no context. You’d have to train them to connect the context of the word with the word itself, and that context would have to make sense to them on their terms, so the conversation would be pretty limited.
See also: gorillas with sign language, dogs with soundboards
You’d actually be surprised at the number of animals capable of holding a conversation once common context has been established.
I mean they are birds. I was just reading the other day that after 50 years of teaching gorillas and chimps sign language, no chimp or ape has ever asked a question. And the longest sentence was 6 words long.
Do you remember the macarena, or despasito, or even worse the numa numa song? Millions of people sang songs in foreign languages and had no idea what the words meant. But they can repeat sounds. It’s the same with birds. You don’t need to know what a word means to copy thrle sound
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