What You Talking Bout? Deciphering Parrot Talk

Happy Fursday, Missians!

Ready to decipher some parrot talk?  Me too.  So, just how do parrots talk?  By what mechanism do these birds get their conversation on?  Keep reading to find out.

According to Wise Geek, "parrots talk or form sounds by expelling air across their syrinx, a distended portion of the trachea."

http://www.wisegeek.com/how-do-parrots-talk.htm

Further information on the subject comes from Audubon.org:

Parrots are vocal learners, meaning they grasp sounds by hearing and then imitating them. Although

several other bird species can discern and repeat sounds, parrots are the pros.

Erich Jarvis, a Duke University neuroscientist and vocal learning expert, recently published a study in Plos One explaining why. Any bird that’s a vocal learner has a part of the brain devoted to this, called the ‘song system.’ But in parrots, the song system has two layers—an inner ‘core,’ common to all avian vocal learners, and an outer ‘shell,’ which is unique to parrots. Jarvis thinks that this recently discovered ‘shell’ is what allows parrots to be such expert mimickers (though he hasn’t figured out exactly how it works yet).  But why do they copy human speech? Peer pressure, it turns out. Parrots naturally try to fit in, be it among other parrots or other people.

In the wild, parrots use their vocal prowess to share important information and fit in with the flock, says Irene Pepperberg, a research associate and part-time lecturer at Harvard. Pepperberg is best known for her work probing the intelligence of an African Grey Parrot called Alex, who lived in Pepperberg’s lab for 30 years, until his death in 2007.  “A single bird in the wild is a dead bird; It can’t look for food and look for predators at the same time,” Pepperberg says—but in a flock they can trade off responsibilities.


Parrots are even capable of learning and using varying dialects. Yellow-naped Amazon Parrots in Costa Rica, for example, have regional dialects, and when they swap regions, the transplants often pick up the local twang, Tim Wright, who studies parrot vocalization at New Mexico State University, found in his research.

So plop a parrot into a human household, and it will “try to integrate itself into the situation as though the people were its flock members,” says Pepperberg.

Pet parrots have all the essential conditions for picking up language—time, inspiration, and mental ability. Wild parrots, on the other hand, lack the needed close proximity to speech. (Though wild parrots have been overheard spouting human phrases, presumably learned from escaped pet parrots, this behavior is rare.) “In the wild, parrots focus on other parrots for what they want to learn,” Wright says. It’s only in captivity, when humans become their sources of social interaction, that they start paying attention to us.

The question is, do these precocious birds know what they’re saying? 
To find out the answer to this question, continue reading the article at Audubon.org, here:

https://www.audubon.org/news/why-do-parrots-talk

So, I hope tonight's article shed some new light on how these cool birds communicate, and inspire you all to learn more. 

Until next time,
This is your host J,
signing off...

Let's decipher some parrot talk...