 From
'That
Damn Bird' in Edge, an
interview with Dr. Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis University.
There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially
speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex [a grey parrot] to
sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but
we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds
that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is,
to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing
strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for
this behavior, but we need more solid data.
Thus we are trying to get him to sound out refrigerator letters, the
same way one would train children on phonics. We were doing demos at
the Media Lab for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of
time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a
number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the
tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He
answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies,
"Want a nut."
Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time
to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?"
Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the
routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is
orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and
Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very
slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."
Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to
spell it for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we
were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This
was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed!
Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the
right track with what we were doing. These kinds of things don't happen
in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize
there's a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains
than you might at first imagine.
Many scientists are trying to teach other animals our human languages.
Presumably the reason for doing this is that it will indicate their
intelligence, and perhaps in the process make us realize that we have
no right to treat them as insentient, insensitive automatons, or as
property, and that as intelligent, conscious co-habitants of Earth they
should have rights too.
If that's the case, it seems to me we're going about it all backwards.
Linguists like Noam Chomsky have argued that when we are young the
neural patterns in our brains are actually 'wired' to reflect what we
learn through language, that we become less and less capable of
learning language as we age, and that if we don't learn language before puberty the wiring in our brains just isn't there and we
become incapable of learning language at all.
So rather than trying to teach parrots and chimps and dolphins and
ravens (wonderful mimics, with a repertoire of thousands of natural
sounds) and pigs (sensational at video games, and possibly smarter than
chimps, but with poorly developed vocal chords) to understand and
master human language, why aren't we
trying a lot harder to learn and understand their languages?
I've read all I can find on animal language and animal communication,
and it's pretty slim pickings. If they're able to learn our languages
but we can't seem to figure out theirs, which animal is more intelligent?
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