Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously

Roslyn M. Frank

For the past ﬁve years I’ve been doing research on the cognitive abilities of African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus), attempting to document not only their remark-able linguistic abilities but also examining the way that they interact with their human caretakers, speciﬁcally Greys who have been home-raised and hence exposed to a language-rich environment. Given that literally no work has been done on the linguistic abilities of Greys raised in home environments, the research I’ve carried out to date and which will be discussed in this chapter must be viewed as preliminary, although not necessarily ground-breaking for that term needs to be applied to the outstanding research that Dr. Irene Pepperberg has carried out in her laboratory where she demonstrated the remarkable cognitive abilities of her Greys, Alex, Grifﬁn and Arthur. Pepperberg’s conclusion—which is accepted by animal behaviourists—is that the cognitive abilities of Greys allow them to be ranked as having reasoning skills equivalent to those of a 2- to 3-year-old human child and in some speciﬁc areas the tests showed that a Grey is capable of performing at the level of a 5-year old. Quite surprisingly, leaving aside the outstanding work of Pepperberg and her highly insightful commentaries on the speech production and verbal interactions that her Greys had with her and members of her laboratory staff (Pepperberg 2009), to my knowledge, there still has been no inquiry into how the proven cognitive abilities of these laboratory-trained birds relate to the way that home-raised Greys communicate verbally with humans. While there is a plethora of studies and speculations about how songbirds acquire their songs, no such similar work has been done on Greys in home settings. In any case, Pepperberg’s remarkable research results provide support for the following proposition: that there would be nothing inherently wrong with suggesting complex cognitive interpretations of the verbal performance of home-raised Greys given that the species in question has already been proven to have high intelligence (Waal 2016:41–42).

Chapter 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously Roslyn M. Frank Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psittacus_erithacus_-perching_on_tray-8d.jpg What the data suggest to me is if one starts with a brain with a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system (Pepperberg 2003). 24.1 Introduction For the past ﬁve years I’ve been doing research on the cognitive abilities of African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus), attempting to document not only their remarkable linguistic abilities but also examining the way that they interact with their human caretakers, speciﬁcally Greys who have been home-raised and hence exposed to a language-rich environment. Given that literally no work has been done on the linguistic abilities of Greys raised in home environments, the research I’ve R.M. Frank (&) University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA e-mail: rozfrank14@yahoo.com © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 F. Shariﬁan (ed.), Advances in Cultural Linguistics, Cultural Linguistics, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_24 529 530 R.M. Frank carried out to date and which will be discussed in this chapter must be viewed as preliminary, although not necessarily ground-breaking for that term needs to be applied to the outstanding research that Dr. Irene Pepperberg has carried out in her laboratory where she demonstrated the remarkable cognitive abilities of her Greys, Alex, Grifﬁn and Arthur. However, Pepperberg’s work has been focused on experimentally proving the general level of intelligence of parrots housed and extensively trained in a laboratory setting (Pepperberg 1999, 2010b, 2011b). Her avian subjects were “being trained to communicate—to use labels referentially—rather than being exposed to an environment that allowed consequence-free acquisition without necessarily teaching meaning” (Pepperberg 1999: 214).1 In other words, she was not concerned speciﬁcally with exploring the linguistic abilities of the birds and the cultural world they inhabit and/or create for themselves in a home environment. Rather her goal and one that she certainly achieved was to produce statistically meaningful data concerning the ability of these birds to reason. Fitch described Pepperberg’s approach in this way, saying that “most of Pepperberg’s attention has been focused on cognition, with speech being a means to an end rather than the primary focus of research” (Fitch 2010: 169). Pepperberg’s conclusion—which is accepted by animal behaviourists—is that the cognitive abilities of Greys allow them to be ranked as having reasoning skills equivalent to those of a 2- to 3-year-old human child and in some speciﬁc areas the tests showed that a Grey is capable of performing at the level of a 5-year old. Quite surprisingly, leaving aside the outstanding work of Pepperberg and her highly insightful commentaries on the speech production and verbal interactions that her Greys had with her and members of her laboratory staff (Pepperberg 2009), to my knowledge, there still has been no inquiry into how the proven cognitive abilities of these laboratory-trained birds relate to the way that home-raised Greys communicate verbally with humans. While there is a plethora of studies and speculations about how songbirds acquire their songs, no such similar work has been done on Greys in home settings. In any case, Pepperberg’s remarkable research results provide support for the following proposition: that there would be nothing inherently wrong with suggesting complex cognitive interpretations of the verbal performance of home-raised Greys given that the species in question has already been proven to have high intelligence (Waal 2016: 41–42). 24.2 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics In this chapter I will attempt to show how the scope of Cultural Linguistics can be expanded to include the study of interspecies communication, speciﬁcally, the linguistic abilities and ‘cultural world’ of these other-than-human creatures. Since 1 Emphasis in the original. Cf. also Krashen (1976) and Lambert (1981). 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 531 the chapter is an introduction to the topic, I begin by giving a brief overview of the research that has been done on the linguistic abilities of parrots, concentrating on a particular subspecies, African Grey parrots, parrots who are recognised as being the most proﬁcient in accurately modelling human speech. In the latter sections of the chapter, concrete examples of parrot–human interaction will be analysed. The research focuses almost exclusively on home-raised Greys who, therefore, grew up in a language-rich environment, inhabited by humans, and in close contact with the sociocultural surroundings of their human caretakers. Overall, the chapter has two interrelated objectives. The ﬁrst is to show how the ﬁeld of Cultural Linguistics can beneﬁt from expanding its scope to include the study of the communication skills of nonhuman animals, concretely, the skills evidenced by African Grey parrots. The second objective is to demonstrate how the tools and concerns of Cultural Linguistics are especially appropriate once we move beyond the deeply entrenched semantic cliché that all parrots do is ‘parrot’ and turn our attention to the task of taking parrots seriously. Whereas for many years animal behaviourists and those working in the area of language evolution have been concerned with replicable experiments, testing and quantiﬁcation of results, when we approach the available data from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, our focus becomes the cognitive aspects of parrot speech, how these creatures process their interactions with humans, how they build up their own cultural conceptualisations and cultural schemas, their own cultural worlds, and associated cognitive frameworks which in turn allow them to make sense of what is taking place around them, establish and maintain their relationship with their human caretakers. The latter is often the person with whom the bird bonds as if the human were its own mate. In addition, the parrot interacts verbally with other birds and animals who might be living in the same house. As we will see, much like young children, Greys acquire categories through verbal interactions with their human caretakers and at the same time they also begin to discover how the language and culture of their human interlocutors categorise events, objects, settings and experiences (Shariﬁan 2015: 479–481). And in the case of home-raised Greys, the resulting cultural categories “are acquired through normal exposure to caregivers and culture with little explicit instruction” (Glushko et al. 2008: 129). 24.3 Why Have the Cognitive Aspects of the Linguistic Performance of African Grey Parrots Been Ignored? While a number of reasons could be cited for this profound lack of interest in the linguistic performance of African Greys, leaving aside the highly entrenched expression ‘to parrot’, there are two reasons that should be kept foremost in mind. First, there is the assumption that the abilities shown by Alex who was Pepperberg’s 532 R.M. Frank ﬁrst and most well-known laboratory-trained Grey, resulted from his intensive training in the laboratory. Although his performance is understood to reflect the innate cognitive abilities of other Greys, it has been assumed that unless the bird is trained under laboratory conditions, it will not exteriorise its innate cognitive capacities. For example, in her review of The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, Lyon talks about the chapters in that volume dedicated to exploring possible parallels between bird song and human language, adding these comments about Alex: “Another aspect is Pepperberg’s research with the remarkable grey parrot Alex […], with its reported ability to learn symbolic representation to perceive, imitate and produce new sequences of vocal sounds in a quasi-dialogue with a human. It will be interesting to see if this can be produced in another parrot” (Lyon 2014: 130). Lyon’s last statement sums up what seems to be the prevailing consensus among those working in the ﬁeld of language evolution and interspecies communication studies. They seem to hold the view that what Alex achieved was totally unique in the sense that his verbal abilities are not shared by parrots who have not undergone similar extensive training. For example, Pepperberg demonstrated that, just as Arbid (2006) points out is the case for young children, “Alex goes beyond simple imitation; he acquires the phonological repertoire, some words, and basic “assembly skills” of his trainers and appears to parse complex behavior patterns (words and phrases) into recombinable pieces and familiar (or semi-familiar) actions” (Pepperberg 2006). However, the assumption has been that home-raised African Greys are not capable of doing the same thing. In short, for these researchers, not only is the jury is still out, the only way to prove otherwise is for someone else to spend years training a Grey in a laboratory setting so as to replicate the results that Pepperberg achieved with Alex. There is no discussion of the possibility of looking at other types of evidence, for instance, accessing a corpus that is a readily available: the incredibly vast amount of audiovisual material afforded by the Internet, concretely, the literally hundreds of videos that can be found on YouTube which show Greys at home, vocalising alone by themselves as well as interacting with humans and not just in English, but in many other languages. There are many YouTube celebrity Greys who have their own fan clubs, birds that have their own YouTube channels and followers, a Facebook page and often an elaborate interactive website from which these video clips can be easily accessed and viewed.2 Taken collectively, these video clips represent a corpus that can be subjected to study, raw material documented in audiovisual form which shows hundreds of Greys who have acquired their communication skills, however minimal, through social interactions with humans in informal settings.3 2 A list of some of the celebrity parrots who have followings on the Internet can be found at the end of this chapter. 3 When viewing these videos and attempting to understand what the bird is saying, I recommend you do the following: watch the video once, then, go to another screen, that is, eliminate the visual element so that you are not distracted by the visual imagery and are listening only to the audio track of the clip. After listening to the clip several times, you will discover that you will follow far better what the bird is saying. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 533 As will become apparent in this chapter, the advantages of having access to this corpus of audiovisual materials on YouTube are manifold. The materials are readily available in an open-access format and are down-loadable so that the results of the analysis of a clip by one researcher can be compared to those of other researchers. The videos are time-coded making it possible to pin-point the segments under discussion. Moreover, in them not only do we have direct access to the bird’s vocalisations, we can also see how the bird uses its repertoire of L1 vocalisations, chirps, whistles, clicks and squawks along with speciﬁc gestures—vocalisations and gestures that are typical of the species itself—to punctuate what it is saying, inserting them as it communicates by means of L2 words and phrases.4 A second reason that has led to the neglect of this area of research lies in the way that disciplines are walled off from each other. Until now, research on the communicative abilities of parrots has been discussed exclusively from two perspectives: language evolution and animal behaviour. As a consequence, little attention has been paid to this area by those working in other disciplines and ﬁelds, such as Cultural Linguistics. Indeed, topics relating to interspecies communication have not penetrated the disciplinary boundaries, much less brought about multidisciplinary attempts to sort out the various theories and evidence concerning the cognitive abilities of parrots and, more narrowly, the abilities repeatedly demonstrated by African Greys. There is one other factor that needs to be mentioned and which may have acted to keep these concerns from coming to the attention of the wider community of linguists and anthropologists working outside the aforementioned areas, e.g. outside the ﬁelds of language evolution and animal behaviour. I refer to the deeply engrained belief that what sets humans apart from the rest of the members of the animal kingdom is our ability to use language. If we take the linguistic abilities of parrots seriously, the gulf separating us seems to narrow, as we ﬁnd ourselves communicating in a meaningful way with a creature whose linguistics skills make it capable of responding to us in our own language, albeit with the same limited level of sophistication that young children display in the early stages of their language learning. While the communication code that Greys acquire is not fully isomorphic with human language, the verbal interactions allow us a means of gaining cognitive access to their world (Pepperberg 1999: 209–214). The degree to which this direct 4 Regarding the use of the term L1 to refer to the use of whistles, chirps and squawks by ‘home-raised’ Greys, Bush (2016) notes that in some instances ‘home-raised’ Greys spend their ﬁrst several months of life with their parrot parents (in a human home, to be sure, but in constant contact with their parents, and often other Greys as well), from whom they might in fact acquire some basic ‘Grey language’. Whether these various calls are the same as those used in the wild, with the same meanings, is impossible to say at this point. Consequently, it would be a mistake to regard those calls as necessarily innate or instinctive, without further research. It is at least possible that parrots a few generations removed from the wild have continued to pass along to their offspring the calls that they themselves may have learned as babies. Cf. also Berg et al. (2012). 534 R.M. Frank type of bridging communication is possible will become more evident in the sections that follow. Inversely, to continue to argue that all parrots do is ‘mimic’ or ‘parrot’ is a way to maintain the divide between human animals and the rest of the animal world. 24.4 Self-talk and Practice Sessions African Greys have a remarkable personality trait, one that makes it easier for us to analyse, albeit always tentatively, what is going on inside their heads: on a daily basis they engage in solitary ‘musing’ sessions where they seem to entertain themselves by practicing the pronunciation of new words and phrases, question-and-answer routines which were provided by the human caregiver as well as question-and-answer routines of their own invention. Usually only after they have mastered the new word or phrase is it used in public. Furthermore, these sessions of self-talk often take place with the parrot perched all alone on the top of the bathroom shower, a favourite location. They are readily caught on camera providing an intriguing glimpse into what the parrot must assume is its private space. Indeed, the fact that they prefer to practice new words away from the limelight is intriguing in itself. Like human children, Greys often practice verbalising and engage in word play when they are alone. They also prefer to do so in a speciﬁc location away from prying eyes. Some authors suggest that “the observed playing with sounds may occur because it allows children and parrots alike to practice without receiving negative feedback for errors. Children have been observed to engage in such solitary word play through age 7 […]” (Hillix and Rumbaugh 2004: 250). In contrast, parrots seem to continue to engage in these solitary behaviours over the course of their entire lives. Given that their life expectancy is nearly as great as that of many humans on this planet, 40–60 years in captivity, this means the language learning sessions that they create for themselves and which often produce remarkable results, are not momentary blips on their cognitive radar. The following comments by Pepperberg are relevant to this discussion of ‘self-talk’ or ‘monologue speech’: Although phylogenetically remote from one another, Grey parrots and humans share certain cognitive and communicative abilities. Greys learn simple vocal syntactic patterns and referential elements of human communication; on certain tasks (e.g., label acquisition, categorization, numerical competence, relative size, conjunction, recursion) their processing abilities and learning strategies may parallel those of young human children […] despite their walnut-sized brains that are organized somewhat differently from those of primates and even songbirds (Jarvis and Mello 2000; Jarvis et al. 2005; Striedter 1994). (Pepperberg 2010a: 359) 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 535 Like children, Grey parrots use sound play (phonetic ‘babbling’ and recombination) to produce new speech patterns from existent ones. This implies that they acoustically represent labels as do humans and develop phonetic categories. Pepperberg emphasises that parallels also exist in the ways that birds and children learn to produce the sounds that make up their vocalisations. In short, both birds and humans engage in various types of practice, including constructing private monologues (Pepperberg 2010a: 359). Pepperberg dedicates an entire section to how Greys in captivity utilise “practice and monologue speech”, whereas how parrots might use this behavior in nature is unknown, but given the complexity of their learned vocalizations (May 2004), their behavior might parallel human children’s practice of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (West and King 1985), that is, both children’s early babbling and their later monologue speech. Such monologue speech, although not essential for human language acquisition, has been observed for most children (Kuczaj 1983; Nelson 1989) and has two components: private speech produced in solitude, and social-context speech produced in the presence of potential receivers but without obvious communicative purpose (e.g., undirected commentary while playing with toys; Fuson 1979; Kuczaj and Bean 1982). Interestingly, in our laboratory Alex demonstrated certain parallels with children’s practice of both types of monologue speech (Pepperberg 1999). (Pepperberg 2010a: 364) Preferring to practice their new words and phrases in private is common behaviour for Greys. Over a designated period, my students and I taped and transcribed evidence (Pepperberg et al. 1991) showing that Alex practiced his labels in private, often (though not always) for several weeks before he uttered them in public. He would generally start with sounds already in his repertoire, then recombine and vary them until he hit upon something that resembled the targeted pattern that he heard during training. He also occasionally reproduced sets of questions and answers, reconstructing and reinventing scenarios not involved in formal training. Monologues included utterances from daily routines (e.g., “you go gym”, “want some water”) and strings involving often-heard patterns (e.g., “you be good, gonna go eat lunch, I’ll be back tomorrow”). Question-answer dialogues (e.g., “snap, snap, snap,” “How many?” “Three”) also emerged. Such performance may be integral to development and, because it occurs across many species, suggests an evolutionary theory of language play (Kuczaj 1998). Pepperberg 2010a: 364) As noted, these musings or periods of self-reflection sometimes include practice sessions, monologues in which the bird tries to improve its pronunciation of a word or phrase. Those sessions indicate that the bird has a mental image of the correct pronunciation of what it has heard and that its repeated attempts are efforts on its part to bring that acoustical mental image into sync with what it is producing. Hence, there are two levels of monitoring going on: ﬁrst, there is evidence that the bird has monitored what the human has said and second, that using that image the bird monitors its own performance trying to match the two acoustical images, the one held in its memory and the one(s) that it is producing as it practices the pronunciation of the word or phrase. 536 24.5 R.M. Frank The Complexity of Being Bilingual At this juncture, I will discuss some of the factors that need to be taken into consideration when examining the way that these remarkable creatures exteriorise their understandings of their second language (L2), namely, how birds who have never lived in the wild switch back and forth between their ﬁrst (‘native’) language, referred to here as L1 which they employ vocally and gesturally, and their second enculturated language, designated as L2. Our discussion will concentrate on Greys who have acquired their L2 code in a language-rich home setting, rather than in a laboratory. There is also the question of how Greys draw on aspects of their L1 body language to underline what they are communicating verbally in their L2 code. Moreover, just as has been noted in human face-to-face interactions, it appears that the bird’s L1 gestures may be initiated slightly ahead of the vocalisation to which the movement is attached cognitively: the gesture is keying what is to come. Given that reading parrot body language is a way to determine the bird’s state of mind as well as to assess know how it is feeling overall, the way they use their bodies to communicate has been studied intensively over the years. There are many books, articles, online websites and videos that discuss the way that Greys use body language to express their emotional state. Hence, there is little mystery about how many of their L1 gestures, those that appear to be genetically programmed, should be read (Heidenreich 2008). The question is how these gestures are used to punctuate or otherwise illustrate their L2 utterances as well as the way they interrelate to their complex L1 vocalisations, those chirps and clicks whose precise meanings still have not yet been deciphered. Thus, we have a situation in which the bird is switching back and forth between two codes and in the process creating multimodal utterances that have a verbal and gestural component. Whereas in recent years a great deal of attention has been paid to multimodality in human interaction and with both remarkable and fascinating results, this area of investigation is still in its infancy when it comes to parrot–human communication (Dancygier and Sweetser 2012; Müller et al. 2014; Waal 2016). When the human learns to read the gestural language of the bird, this helps immensely in the communication process. However, there are examples where the parrot begins by trying to communicate gesturally with its human interlocutor but the human fails or refuses to understand. And at the juncture the parrot sometimes resorts to using its L2 verbal code, making its point verbally, that is, explicitly, when it sees that the human has not responded to the L1 gesture. A concrete example of this switching between the L1 gestural code and the L2 verbal code will be discussed in a later section of this chapter. Leaving aside the pioneering work of Dr. Irene Pepperberg, most of what has been written about these parrots can be divided into two basic camps, each 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 537 characterised by a very different perspective. On the one hand, there is the point of view shared by animal behaviourists who have little or no knowledge of linguistics, yet alone Cultural Linguistics, and therefore are engaged in ‘testing’, producing statistically signiﬁcant empirically replicable experiments, that is, studying birds living under laboratory conditions. On the other hand, there is the perspective that shows up in popular books written by owners of Greys in which the authors talk about their personal experiences, the problems and joys of living with a Grey, and how the bird relates to them. These narratives often include fascinating anecdotal information about what the bird does and says (Burger 2002; Gardiner 2010) and at times signiﬁcant insight into the parrot–human communication process (Craige 2010; Pepperberg 2009). For the most part, however, these are books oriented toward the large audience of parrot owners, parrots being the most common pet after dogs and cats. Although the birds described in these books have been immersed in a language-rich home setting, rather than a laboratory, there is no objective way of proving that the utterances the authors attribute to the birds ever took place. With the advent of YouTube the situation changed radically, for now we have direct access to hundreds of videos of Greys in home settings and often multiple videos are available which feature the same bird talking either to itself or to a human interlocutor. Consequently, there is corpus of material accessible to those who are interested in expanding the scope of Cultural Linguistics so that the linguistic abilities and cultural understandings of these other-than-human animals can be studied. At the same time, I should point out that with a few notable exceptions (Colbert-White et al. 2011; Pepperberg [1999], 2011a) investigations carried out by members of the ﬁrst group have been done by people who are interested in a broad category of creatures called ‘vocal learners’ (or ‘vocal mimicking species’) and have not had the opportunity to be in close, daily contact with a Grey, interacting personally with it. As a result, there has been little discussion of the ‘culture’ or ‘world’ of these birds, how they view and interact with their human ‘mate’, what topics they bring up repeatedly, that is, activities and events that are of particular interest or concern to them and about which they have acquired a certain fluency, using learned conversational routines and occasionally original ones. Many of the recurring topics might be classiﬁed as having a bodily component in that they relate to food and the act of eating, naming or requesting different foods;5 showering, one of their favourite activities; controlling unwanted behaviours, such as biting, 5 The following sequence is a mini drama that comes from a monologue created by a parrot named Poppy: “Poppy, what do you want for breakfast? Eggs, butter, milk, toast, yoghurt? I want tators!” Cf. at 5:31 min. in “Poppy the African Grey’s Hottest New Video.” https://www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=D9sKaEMBB64. 538 R.M. Frank squawking and pooping, either improperly or properly;6 and requesting affection (scratches, kisses, cuddles, hugs). However, the list of frequently recurring topics found in their verbal conversational routines goes far beyond those with a bodily component, again depending on what they have learned from listening to and interacting with the humans with whom they live. Other more linguistically oriented areas of interest are the ways that Greys manipulate pronouns, construct verbs and deal with collocations, use or fail to use singular–plural contrasts. They are also capable of coming up with their own vocabulary items, spontaneously creating compound words they have never heard spoken (Bush, in preparation; Pepperberg 2011b). Of particular interest are the mini dramas that they invent while practicing monologue speech in which the bird portrays itself and/or its human caretaker as participants, a topic that will be treated in more detail in the sections that follow. Admittedly, there are many unanswered questions about the upper limit of their vocabulary as well as the syntactic complexity of their constructions. For instance, relative clauses seem to be totally absent. A related area has to do with the way that certain words are used by Greys to create cover terms, categories or prototypes that can sometimes strike us as quite mundane, but at other times are quite unusual and/or totally unexpected. At the same time these cover terms—these semantic generalisations—can often reveal to us or at least suggest to us the underlying cognitive processes that led to the creation of the category. Finally, there are the many concrete examples of the often bizarre sense of humour which these birds manifest verbally. Moreover, what they seem to ﬁnd funny frequently reveals a level of cognitive complexity and complicity, e.g. the recognition that the human will understand the joke, implicit in such exchanges. For instance, instead of crying out when the phone rings using the standard routine, “Telephone for Betty Jean!” (the bird’s human), Betty Jean’s Cosmo often pipes up saying “Telephone for Cosmo!” or “Telephone for bird!” (Craige 2010).7 Their sense of humour—that is, what the birds themselves ﬁnd humourous—often seems to be based on their intuition of the absurd, their enjoyment in creating contrary-to-fact situations, e.g. utterances in which they assign ‘feathers’ to their caretaker, or they can engage in ‘telephone games’, e.g. by making up fake phone conversations beginning with the sound of beeps, marking the number they are supposedly dialling and playing the role of both parties in the conversation, although the other person’s voice always tends to be muffled, and then ending with 6 While Greys are house-trained to ‘poop’ only in approved locations, accidents often happen, accidents that the bird itself often monitors, talking about this bodily action, just before and after it occurs. 7 For further examples of the wild sense of humour that Cosmo has, cf. http://www.cosmotalks. com/books/. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 539 a ‘good-bye’.8 Another common strategy relies on their ability to perfectly replicate the sound of a phone ringing. By doing this, they can trick their caretaker into coming into the room to answer the non-existent call. The cognitive aspects of this verbal playfulness need to be investigated in more depth. In other instances, we ﬁnd examples of a Grey trying to make sense of what the human is saying. Sometime it is the bird who asks a question of its human interlocutor. And because of the way the question is formulated we can see that the bird is confused about what has been said and wants clariﬁcation. One of these examples demands detailed discussion for it is truly remarkable in terms of the mental processing that precedes the formulation of the bird’s question. The sequence appears clearly documented in a video of a very loquacious 2-year-old Grey named Halo who speaks English with a Scottish accent, a sequence that will be discussed in detail in the latter section of this chapter, along with material from several other video clips. Indeed, there is ample evidence that parrots are conscious of their own internal mental activities. Online videos and personal narratives by owners provide many examples of utterances which show that these parrots understand categories and are capable of constructing untaught variations of a learned template or routine. Detailed study of the spontaneous vocalisations of Pepperberg’s Alex has shown that his spontaneous vocalisations were combinations and phonological variations of speciﬁc vocal English labels that the bird had previously acquired. Although initially these recombinations were not necessarily used intentionally by the bird to describe or request novel objects or circumstances, it is clear that the bird did come to use such vocalisations referentially and intentionally to identify, request, refuse and categorise various objects (Pepperberg 1990a, b). This is also true of other Greys included in this study: the birds often engage in intentional behaviour. In other words, we can ﬁnd the birds attaching functional significance to their utterances. In short, Greys are capable of commenting about or requesting objects, actions or information. They monitor their surroundings and verbally react to changes in them. Moreover, given that African Grey parrots may live for 40–60 years in captivity and have excellent memories, these little creatures with a brain the size of shelled walnut have plenty of time to acquire and improve their communication skills. 24.6 Implications of Rhythmic Synchrony for Verbal and Gestural Performance In 2009, the ﬁrst evidence for rhythmic entrainment, long believed to be an exclusive prerogative of humans, was demonstrated in several bird species, raising interesting questions, according to the investigators, about the evolutionary biology 8 An excellent example of the fascination that phone calls hold for Greys is the case of Larry who in this short video makes repeated fake phone calls: “Larry the parrot dials an imaginary phone number, rambles a little, then starts laughing.” Cf. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=CB6QCzBZgc. 540 R.M. Frank of music. The mechanism, frequently touted as uniquely human, is rhythmic synchronisation to music: the capacity to move one’s limbs or body to a complex external beat. Until 2009 such entrainment, necessary for ensemble musical playing and dancing and found in all human cultures, had not been demonstrated in other-than-human animals. The researchers in question made the startling discovery after a video link was sent to them of an Internet sensation, a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora) called Snowball.9 The video was ﬁrst uploaded to YouTube in 2007. By 2008, at the time it was brought to the attention of Drs. Aniruddh D. Patel and John R. Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, it had already garnered over two million hits. After viewing the video, the two experimenters contacted the bird’s caretaker and using versions of Snowball’s favourite song, they video-taped the bird’s dancing while modifying the underlying beat. What Patel et al. (2009b) discovered was that as the tempo of the musical excerpt was modiﬁed, Snowball entrained appropriately to the beat by slowing down his bobbing or speeding it up. Even though Snowball’s sense of rhythm was not perfect —it went slightly in and out of synchrony—the team’s use of Monte Carlo simulations allowed them to show that the bouts of entrainment were unlikely to have occurred by chance. Later, a second set of experiments was conducted on Alex, the African Grey trained by Pepperberg, with similar results (Schackner et al. 2009). In summary, research carried out on two species of parrots, Cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) and African Greys (Psittacus erithacus), led the two teams of researchers to reach the same conclusions and hypothesise that the human capacity for entrainment could be a byproduct of the vocal learning mechanisms that allow us to learn speech sounds and musical melodies. However, the hypothesis did not extend to posing the question of whether the head bobbing of parrots such as African Greys had anything to do with their remarkable capacity to produce human-like vocalisations. As noted, African Greys spontaneously entrain to a beat: they have a sense of rhythm just as we do (Dreifus 2010; Patel 2009, 2014; Patel et al. 2009a, b, c; Schackner et al. 2009). And this may be connected to their often uncanny ability not only to talk but to whistle a melody and sing the words, at times even making up 9 There is even a Wikipedia entry dedicated to Snowball which gives more details of the bird’s life and how it became famous overnight. Cf. links in the reference section below to Snowball. A lessor known but equally amazing dancing sensation is Frostie, a 27-year-old Bare-Eyed Cockatoo, whose moves are even flashier than those of Snowball. Cf. https://www.facebook.com/ karla.larsson/videos/10202328761997126/. So far, Frostie’s original video has collected 11,252,000 hits since it was uploaded in 2009 and the number is growing every day. As is the case with many of these Internet sensations, Frostie has her own following, e.g. some 360,000 ‘likes’ on her Facebook Fan Club Page: https://www.facebook.com/FrostieTheDancingCockatoo. Moreover, a perusal of these videos will reveal that, much like young children, each bird has invented its own preferred dance moves, some of which are quite unique, for example: https://www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=qTl1asCDOgs. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 541 their own lyrics to the song when they have forgotten or don’t understand the original ones. In addition, because of their unique vocal apparatus and heightened sense of hearing, they are able to mimic the intonation and contours of the voice of their human mate so accurately that if you can’t see the bird’s beak moving, it can be difﬁcult to ﬁgure out who is actually doing the talking,10 which can be frustrating to those pets, often very obedient dogs, who hear their name being called only to discover they have been tricked: that it was the parrot not their owner whistling and asking them to come into the room.11 The musical abilities of parrots—their ability to entrain to a beat—have caught the attention of researchers, but not in relation to what this means in terms of the richness and complexity of the cognitive processes that are going on inside the heads of the birds as they bob, dance and sing.12 Rather those who have investigated the tendency in nonhuman animals to move in rhythmic synchrony with a musical beat (e.g. via head bobbing, or the rhythmic body movements we associate with dancing) have been concerned with looking at whether animal models can provide insights into the neurobiology and evolution of human music, and the role of entrainment in the evolution of human language (Fitch 2006, 2009; Patel 2009; Patel et al. 2009a, b). The hypothesis, originally formulated by Patel (2006: 102; 2008: 411), predicted that only members of vocal learning species, such as humans, some species of birds, bats, cetaceans and pinnipeds, but not nonhuman primates, would be capable of synchronising movements to a musical beat. Furthermore, in 2006 Patel stated that the hypothesis “suggests that if primates do fail at BPS [beat perception and synchronization] it would be premature to conclude that BPS is 10 The degree to which these birds can mimic the sound of the voice of their human mate is demonstrated in a book by Betty Jean Craige, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Georgia. Betty Jean tells of an attempt that was made to document the way her parrot Cosmo interacted verbally with her under different circumstances. Initially, the experiment was documented using a tape recorder. But the experimenters soon realised there was a problem: they discovered that the bird imitated the contours of Betty Jean’s voice so accurately that at times when reviewing the audial tapes they couldn’t tell whether it was the bird or the human who was doing the talking. So they started video-taping: that way they could see whose mouth was moving. The results of the video-taped sessions provided the basis of a fascinating article which includes an extensive list of Cosmo’s utterances. The list consists of two parts: vocalisations making up the bird’s native repertoire—chirps, whistles, squawks and clicks—along with imitations of the sound of a variety of other creatures and entities (owl hoots, hawk cries, frog croaks, dog barks, doors creaking open, beeps from a telephone dialling, telephone rings, the sound of kisses, etc.) and then a listing of his L2 utterances, his statements, questions and responses in English (Colbert-White et al. 2011). 11 Here is an example of an African Grey called Larry, imitating the husband’s voice and trying to trick Max, the family dog, into coming to him: “Larry the Parrot calls out for his friend Max the Dog.” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=GcbYHWUnE0I. 12 The video called “Einstein’s Shower Speech: Talking, Singing, & Dancing!” is a good example of what goes on in a musing session as the bird entertains itself by engaging in ‘self-talk’: https:// www.YouTube.com/watch?v=fJCsI6j-8Zc. 542 R.M. Frank unique to humans. Determining whether nonhuman vocal learners can acquire BPS will be an essential part of probing the human-speciﬁcity of musical abilities” (Patel 2006: 102). As noted, subsequent research on two species of parrots by Patel et al. (2009b) and Schackner et al. (2009) conﬁrmed this position. After analysing some four thousand YouTube videos of animals moving to music and examining each for any evidence of synchronised movements, Schackner et al. (2009) found that only videos featuring vocal mimics fell into that category, and only those of 15 species—14 types of parrots and the Asian elephant. In the case of at least 9 of those, the movements were consistent enough that they were unlikely to have arisen through chance. Previously, the ability to entrain to the beat, fundamental both for music production and for coordinated dance, had been repeatedly highlighted as a uniquely human characteristic. What is especially striking in this study is the innovative data-mining technique utilised by the researchers who were able to create an extensive comparative data set from a global video database which was then systematically analysed for evidence of entrainment in hundreds of species, both capable and incapable of vocal mimicry. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 543 Source Schackner et al. (2009). Despite the higher representation of vocal nonmimics in the database and comparable exposure of mimics and nonmimics to humans and music, only vocal mimics showed evidence of entrainment. Therefore, the researchers concluded that entrainment was not unique to humans and that the distribution of entrainment across species supports the hypothesis that entrainment evolved as a byproduct of selection for vocal mimicry (Schackner et al. 2009). Summarised, the hypothesis can be expressed as follows: that having the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning is a necessary prerequisite for the ability to synchronise with an auditory beat. However, things are a bit more complicated because having the capacity for 544 R.M. Frank vocal learning, although necessary, is not sufﬁcient for auditory entrainment. As these studies show, there are many vocal learning species that do not show entrainment even though they are capable of ‘vocal mimicry’ and often trained by humans (Fitch 2009). Meanwhile, there is little discussion of whether having the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning and also having the ability to synchronise to a beat, as is the case of parrots, might constitute part of a basic package of cognitive abilities and as such be prerequisites for acquiring, using and understanding a complex communication code such as human language and furthermore relating to humans using components drawn from the human’s own language. Rather the study of musically relevant abilities in other species has been dedicated almost exclusively to addressing “the evolutionary and neural foundations of human musical abilities” (Patel et al. 2009c). While humans are included in the category of ‘vocal learning species’, the term itself does not refer speciﬁcally to species that have the ability to learn and use language, but rather only to those species who have the ability to mimic sounds. On this view, vocal learning species, including parrots, merely imitate the sounds they hear around them without true comprehension of what they are saying. Hence, vocal learning is viewed as a neurobiological substrate, but not equivalent to having the ability to acquire and use language. In order to understand what is at stake when we apply this assumption to parrots, especially African Greys, we need to begin by examining the particular way that the term ‘vocal learning’ is deﬁned. Vocal learning, the substrate of human language, is a very rare trait. It is known to be present in only 6 groups of animals: 3 groups of birds (parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds) and 3 groups of mammals (bats, cetaceans [whales/dolphins], and humans). All other groups of animals are thought to produce genetically innate vocalizations. To understand this concept, it is important to distinguish vocal learning from auditory learning. Auditory learning is the ability to make sound associations, such as a dog learning how to respond to the sound “sit”. All vertebrates have auditory learning. Vocal learning is the ability to imitate sounds that you hear, such as a human or a parrot imitating the sound “sit”. Currently only vocal learners have been found to have forebrain regions dedicated to vocal learning and production of these learned vocalizations. Vocal non-learners only have been found to have non-forebrain vocal regions responsible for the production of innate vocalizations. (Jarvis 2004a) According to Chakraborty et al. (2015), vocal learning is thought to have evolved to allow for more complex communication and cultural transmission of learned conspeciﬁc vocal repertoires that are important for social cohesion. Moreover, since complex vocal learning is not found in close relatives, it is generally thought that each vocal learning lineage evolved this trait independently (Fitch 2000; Slater 1997; Nottebohm 1972, 1975). 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 545 While the study of the neurobiology of the three avian species of vocal learners (songbirds, hummingbirds and parrots) is still in its infancy, investigators use the following terminology, classifying parrots as the species exhibiting “the most advanced vocal mimicry among non-human animals” (Chakraborty et al. 2015). While the linguistic abilities of parrots are still regularly referred to as nothing more than the “ability to imitate complex sounds”, researchers are now beginning to examine the differences in connectivity, brain position and shape in the vocal learning systems of parrots relative to those of songbirds and hummingbirds. The results, albeit based only on the examination of one parrot species, the budgerigar, are interesting. Although no differences in the presence of song system structures were encountered when compared with other avian vocal learners, investigators found the following: The parrot brain uniquely contains a song system within a song system. The parrot “core” song system is similar to the song systems of songbirds and hummingbirds, whereas the “shell” song system is unique to parrots. The core with only rudimentary shell regions were found in the New Zealand kea, representing one of the only living species at a basal divergence with all other parrots, implying that parrots evolved vocal learning systems at least 29 million years ago. Relative size differences in the core and shell regions occur among species, which we suggest could be related to species differences in vocal and cognitive abilities. (Chakraborty et al. 2015) Understood even more broadly, birds such as African Greys, although having diverged from the lineage leading to humans approximately 280 million years ago, can provide models for the evolution of vocal communication. As Pepperberg has stated, “Grey parrots, despite considerable phylogenetic separation from humans, acquire comparable human-like communication skills and, unlike present-day apes, can imitate human speech because they can learn novel vocalizations. Speciﬁcally, they acquire species-speciﬁc and heterospeciﬁc vocalizations by actively matching their progressive production of speciﬁc sound patterns to live interacting models or memorized templates” (Pepperberg 2011b: 110). Here I would add that in contrast to those who regularly classify parrots merely as ‘vocal mimics’, Pepperberg (2011b: 110) states that “Imitation is most stringently deﬁned as purposeful, meaningful replication of an otherwise improbably novel act (Thorpe 1963), distinguishing it from mimicry (meaningless replication of physical actions or vocalizations) […].” In summary, parrots regularly display evidence of rhythmic entrainment, i.e. the ability to sync the movements of their body with an external source of sound or music. Even more remarkably they do this when the source of the music is in their heads: you can see that they are thinking, silently, about a melody and then they start bobbing to the rhythm they themselves have invented for their own entertainment. Similarly, the human can key them with the words ‘dance’, ‘sing’ or ‘music’ and they will begin bobbing away, clearly having associated the words, generically, with the sound and rhythm of music. At many times in sessions of self-talk it is the bird itself that uses the word ‘dance’ to initiate its dance moves, as 546 R.M. Frank if it were a response to a request by the human caretaker or that the bird were addressing itself: “Dance, bird!”.13 The mystery behind all of this is whether the musical abilities of parrots—abilities shared by parrots and humans, but not nonhuman primates—have anything to do with the unique wiring of their brains and hence, by extension, with the evolutionary path taken by humans who did develop complex linguistic codes absent from parrots in the wild. Just how complex the L1 vocalisations of Greys are is another question but one that could be explored by carefully studying the way that Greys intersperse their L2 utterances with speciﬁc vocalisations drawn from their L1 repertoire. In other words, it might be possible to gain access to how the bird is using these L1 vocalisations, very distinct calls, whistles, clicks, chirps and squawks, to underline or otherwise communicate pragmatic aspects of the conversation that they are carrying on, literally, by code-switching between L1 and L2. Until now, although the meaning attached to these distinctive L1 vocalisations has not been studied, they do seem to be part of their native repertoire. Whereas in the case of home-raised parrots, these L1 vocalisations fall on deaf ears, that is, they are not understood by the human, in the wild such vocalisations probably play a far different role (Berg et al. 2011). 24.7 Cognitive and Linguistic Signiﬁcance of Mini Dramas: Parrot Theatrics In the wild, Greys are social animals. They live in large flocks whose social complexity may rival that of primates (Pepperberg 2010a: 359). And they seem to recognise their conspeciﬁcs by the nature of their contact calls, another indication of their auditory sensitivities (Farabaugh et al. 1994). Greys are also monogamous, spending most of their time not only with their mate but in almost constant back-and-forth vocal communication with him or her. In the case of home-raised birds, they regularly bond with one of the humans in the household, treating the person as a replacement mate. And this might help to explain why Greys tend to be so keen on interacting vocally with their human caregivers throughout the day. For instance, they clearly enjoy interactions consisting of a question and answer which is analogous to a kind of contact call-and-response, a type of verbal interaction that requires the active engagement of both parties. 13 In the following video clip Einstein uses the gerundive form ‘dancing, dancing’ while bobbing about, but without giving himself a self-command to do so. Here we might say that ‘dancing, dancing’ is the way he is describing or illustrating verbally his own actions. A bit later he adds a command from an imaginary interlocutor into the mix, saying, “Dancing, Dance, birdie! Dancing” which he accompanies with the appropriate bobbing body gestures. The bird also whistles a few bars of different melodies, e.g. the Andy Grifﬁth song—a melody that for some reason is quite popular among Greys—as well as singing a few snippets of lyrics taken from other songs. Cf. 18:26 to 23:59 min. in “Einstein’s Shower Speech: Talking, Singing, & Dancing!” https://www. YouTube.com/watch?v=fJCsI6j-8Zc. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 547 Any parrot owner can attest to the strong social bonding that occurs between human caregivers and their home-raised African Greys. Home-raised parrots often treat their human caregivers like a conspeciﬁc pair mate. Because speech can replace or be used in conjunction with species-typical vocalizations in captive parrots, we hypothesized that one function of the spontaneous speech (and other discrete nonword vocalizations) that home-raised parrots produce is to maintain social contact with their owners. Thus, we expected that a linguistic analysis would provide evidence that some vocalizations in the parrots’ repertoire serve the function of a wild parrot contact call. (Colbert-White et al. 2011: 176) In summary, since home-raised Greys regularly employ these distinctive L1 species-typical vocalisations, frequently interspersing them with words and phrases whose meanings we usually can understand, it is possible that eventually the communicative import of each of their different L1 vocalisations will become accessible to us, albeit in a hypothetical fashion. As noted, in the wild African Greys not only mate for life, they rarely leave the side of their mate—interacting constantly with him or her. Hence, they have a built-in need to be interacting with the human who is now their surrogate mate. And this may be one of the reasons that they attempt to engage us in conversation with them. But, as noted above, they also like to talk to themselves in private, sometimes using mirrors. As Pepperberg et al. (1995) have shown, parrots pass the ‘mirror test’ while Gallup (1991) has suggested that mirror recognition indicates a concept of self. In short, there is evidence that Greys recognise themselves in the image. What is more signiﬁcant, however, is what happens when they are alone and entertain themselves by inventing mini dramas in which they often physically act out the scripts they create for themselves. In these mini dramas the parrot regularly plays the role of both interlocutors and often acts out what it is saying, pretending, for instance, that the human has said “Want a grape?” And then as if the imaginary interlocutor were giving the object to the bird, the parrot grasps the equally imaginary grape in its claw and brings it to its mouth, making munching sounds or other sounds of approval like “Yum, yum!”14 Thus, even when the bird is alone, it can create an imaginary companion with whom to talk. We could argue that one of the motivating factors for these solitary theatrical performances is the deeply felt need to interact verbally with a mate. This could explain why during their musing sessions they engage in play-talk and invent mini dramas in which often they play the roles of both parties, that is, verbally imitating the voices and words of the characters involved, the bird itself and one or more of its human caretakers. Another motivating factor might be that, as noted previously, these are practice sessions in which the bird is reflecting verbally on the interactions that it has had with its caretakers during the day and then attempting to improve its pronunciation and fluency by bringing the expressions into sync with an internal audio image, the memory that it has of what it heard earlier, that is, it may be actively matching its speech production to a memorised audial template. 14 For multiple examples of this acting-out routine with imaginary food, cf. “Einstein has a lot to talk about.” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=SOb5z3fWFm4. 548 24.8 R.M. Frank To What Degree Do Parrots ‘Parrot’: What Does It Actually Mean to Employ a Routine? As is well acknowledged, humans regularly utilise conversational routines. In fact, a large percentage of face-to-face interactions between adults are governed by such routines. When a young child is ﬁrst learning language, routines are a key component of the child’s repertoire, often being rehearsed and practiced in private. Early on, these routines consist simply of memorised whole utterances or phrases that the child may use without any knowledge of their internal structure (Aijmer 2014; Krashen and Scarcella 1978). Although the utterances begin as prepackaged routines—rote memorisation of segments of speech—they can result in patterns consisting of partly memorised wholes that have an open slot allowing for creative variations. Moreover, it is common for parents to use routines made up of question and answers with their young children. Greys, too, are capable of storing, repeating and remembering chunks of language and employing them in socially appropriate situations. This means that they must have an awareness of the scenarios into which these pieces of formulaic speech ﬁt and should to be used. In the section that follows segments from several YouTube videos will be analysed, examples which will allow us to see how prepackaged routines can be altered, often very creatively by the avian speech participants. The ﬁrst video features Halo, a 2-year-old African Grey Parrot who lives in the UK.15 The clip begins with a series of exchanges between a young man and Halo in which the bird is prompted to give an answer to a question or ﬁll in a missing word. Both of them speak with a charming Scottish accent. The routines are ones that they both have engaged in many times past. While the man is talking, however, the bird is also talking and making a variety of sounds. The interactions include question– response routines to questions phrased as “Where’s Ryan?” to which Halo is to give an answer, in this instance, “bed”. Meanwhile, as Halo entertains himself by making odd sounds imitating sneezes, farts and burps, the man says to him “That’s rude!”—which again is obviously part of a scripted routine, familiar both to the bird and his interlocutor. Halo also makes the sounds and comments on his actions by saying “That’s rude!” In the video the bird interacts with the human. Sometimes it is the human who initiates the exchange and the bird responds. Other times it is the bird who initiates the conversation, introducing a new topic or asking for attention (a kiss, cuddles, tickles). Although some of this dialogue is unintelligible to me, the human seems to understand most of what the bird says. There is a rather random flow to the conversation, in part because the human tries to elicit responses from the bird, at times based on what the bird has just said; at times because of the bird’s body language. Off and on during the clip, as mentioned, we ﬁnd the human asking Halo questions concerning where the other members of the family are, e.g. “Where’s 15 Cf. “African Grey swearing.” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=nuYdJ3OvbE&NR=1. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 549 Daddy?”, to which the bird gives a response. In this initial set of question and answers, if you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the bird say something rather remarkable. This occurs while the two of them are engaged in question–answer exchanges about where the other members of the family are. There are also intervals in which they sing songs together and engage in other call–response routines. Then you’ll hear the bird ask at 3:33, albeit rather quietly, “Where’s Rude?”, having assumed that the comment “That’s rude” must refer to a person whose name is Rude, perhaps reaching that conclusion from the earlier contextual clues. A further assumption might be that the bird believes that the vocalisation on its part that elicit the comment about ‘being rude’ somehow refers to that individual. I recognise that at ﬁrst glance it doesn’t seem possible that a bird could reanalyse an English sentence in this way, using the contextual clues available to it in the conversational setting and come up with what is an erroneous conclusion, but one that isn’t all that illogical. Moreover, it represents an attempt on the part of the bird to deﬁne the word ‘rude’ in a very creative fashion and at the same time it shows that the bird was paying attention to what was said at a meta-level that is far removed from that of mere mimicry. It is not mindlessly repeating routines that it has memorised and whose meaning it doesn’t comprehend. Rather it is attempting to give meaning to a word whose meaning is not clear to it. When the question ‘Where’s Rude?’ is ﬁrst posed by the bird (3:33), his human interlocutor misses it entirely which is not surprising given that at that point the bird is making random noises and repeating to itself the phrase “that’s rude” which the human understands in one context and the bird, apparently, in another. The ﬁrst time around it’s clear that the human doesn’t hear the question. This lack of comprehension on the human’s part is also due to the fact that the rising intonation contour that should accompany a question isn’t at all present the ﬁrst time around. In other words, the bird is asking the question and the words are correct, but the intonation is too flat. At 6:56 the bird makes another attempt but the human still doesn’t comprehend what he’s saying. He thinks it’s just random chatter. Then at 7:12 the bird tries again. Still no response from the human who is busy with his next question, “Where’s Moma?”. At this point, however, the human does notice that the bird seems to be repeating the word ‘rude’ a lot and tells him “You can’t just use rude in every sentence”. Two minutes later, the bird ﬁnally gets the intonation right and as he does you can almost see the gears turning in his head. This happens at 9:09. By now he’s asked the question at least three or perhaps four times without getting a response from the human. Listen carefully this segment and you’ll hear the bird say “That’s rude”. The bird then hesitates, cocks its head toward the human and articulates his question very clearly and with the appropriate rising intonation at the end: “Where’s Rude?” And this time around, the bird gets a response from the human, who recognising the mistake the bird has made, chuckles, repeats the bird’s question, a clear indication that he has understood it, and then explains: “Where’s Rude? But rude isn’t a person”. In summary, we have a concrete example of how Halo was processing language and by extension insight into the cognitive processes that were going on inside his 550 R.M. Frank head. It would seem that the bird concluded from what it understood to be contextual clues, that ‘rude’ had to be the name of someone. As a result, Halo was asking the human for more information about that person, namely, the person’s whereabouts. Unquestionably, Halo’s inquiry is also a variation on the routine he already has in his repertoire in which the human asks the bird where the different members of the family are: “in the kitchen”, “in the bathroom”, “in bed” and “at the computer”. At a minimum the bird would seem to be formulating a question he hasn’t heard before. Moreover, the response by the young man seems to indicate that the bird’s question was totally unexpected and therefore not part of the set of routine question–answer drills they had practiced before. Finally, it would be helpful to have a study focused on the cognitive implications that derive from the parrot’s interpretations and responses to certain types of sentence constructions. For example, we have constructions in which the human attempts to elicit a response from the bird to statements involving negotiations related to the bird’s behaviour, such as “If you do X, you will get Y” or implied threats of punishment, e.g. “You know what happens if you do X.” In the latter case, the admonition usually comes about as an ultimatum after the bird has failed to behave as the human wants it to. Hence, the response to the warning on the part of the parrot appears to indicate that the bird is processing not so much possible future consequences of a hypothetical set of actions, but rather weighing what might happen to it if it continues to behave as it has to that point, a behaviour that has led to the same consequences in the past. For example, we have the case of a video of Tui16 who normally interacts quite gregariously with Andrew, her mate, while both of them speak to each other with proper Kiwi accents. In this video, Tui alternates whistling and squealing away in L1, while making other comments to Andrew in L2, such as “Shut up! Sssh. Quiet!” As she does so, she continues to let out these whistles, clicks and shrill squeals. Tui appears to be fully aware that what she is doing irritates Andrew and that she should shut up. But there is more to this story. Even though she is the one making the racket, she repeatedly tells Andrew to “Shut up!” In doing this, she is using the same two words that Andrew had directed earlier to her earlier in the day in an attempt to get her to quiet down. However, in doing so, Andrew made the mistake of losing his temper which Tui remembers. At one point in their interactions, Andrew starts to say “You don’t…” and Tui ﬁnishes the sentence for him, ﬁlling in with the word “squeal”, even though Andrew was probably going to say something quite different, namely, “You don’t tell me to shut up”. The completion of the sentence suggests that the bird knows that its L1 noise-making is a no-no. Andrew, fed up with the distraction, asks the bird a question with a threat implied: “You know what happens to you if you squeal?” And then Tui replies with her own question–answer sequence, showing that she knows perfectly well the possible 16 The sequence appears at the beginning of this video clip: “Tui the African Grey has a Tantrum. When parrots attack! Parrot gives a verbal bashing.” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v= NdhlPHEIkss. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 551 consequences of her actions. She repeats Andrew’s question but with a different intonation, as if to say, “You are asking me if I know what happens if I squeal—of course, I know”. Tui’s words are literally: “What happens if you squeal? What happens? Go in cage”. In addition, in the extensive corpus of YouTube videos there are many other interactions that are cognitively rich in their implications. For instance, a common interaction consists of routines in which it is the parrot who poses the question to the human and/or itself and then gives the correct answer or, more remarkably, a deliberately wrong answer. Even when the bird obviously knows the right answer, the wrong answer is given quite clearly to mess around with the caretaker who has asked the question in the beginning and expects the bird to give the correct answer. The parrot named Einstein provides many examples of this playfulness and consequently insight into the sense of humour that Greys often reveal. When interacting with Jeff in a question–answer routine, Einstein refuses to give or rather chooses not to give the right answer. For example, after being asked, “What does a dog say?”, Einstein whinnies like a horse. Then, only seconds later, as if to make clear to the human that he was acting silly, the parrot asks itself “What does a horse say?” and responds correctly with a whinny.17 While the above examples of creative usage of the parrot’s L2 repertoire are somewhat subtle, the following nine-second video which has garnered nearly four million hits leaves little doubt about the bird’s intentional use of a L2 phrase—a command—that it has learned. Initially in the clip, the Grey, called Jasper, tries to use body language to show the human that it doesn’t want to be touched, that is, by threatening to bite the person’s ﬁnger and then when the bird’s L1 body language doesn’t work, it resorts to human language, saying with a very proper British accent: “Don’t touch me!” It is a request that the human, although obviously surprised, acknowledges that he has understood, even though the man continues in his efforts to pet the bird.18 24.9 Resources for Future Studies of the Languaculture of Greys Given the millions of parrot owners scattered throughout the English-speaking world, it is not surprising that there are parrots who have become quite famous with large followings on the Internet. As mentioned, these websites often take the form of blogs, ﬁlled with photos, links to videos and comments from viewers. In some instances, the parrot is portrayed as responding to questions and writing his or her own ﬁrst-person commentaries on the blog. Other parrots are lesser known ﬁlm 17 Cf. “Einstein talking and acting silly.” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=cdhqkWIgkLY. Cf. “Don’t touch me!” https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=hmeUSSEaxfQ. 18 552 R.M. Frank stars, but still famous in their own right, appearing in dozens of videos all of which are available on YouTube where each parrot has its own group of followers. Still the vast majority of these websites and commercial enterprises are oriented toward the care and handling of parrots, and rarely discuss issues relating to the linguistic abilities of these birds or how to help them to acquire a L2 code. The one major exception is the online Avian Cognition Forum (ACF) on Yahoo Groups, run by Virginia Bush, a woman with years of experience as a teacher of ESL and who has kept a meticulous record of the progress of her Grey named Chaucer. It is a record that documents quite literally his actions from day one when he arrived at her house as a 3-month-old baby.19 AFC is a forum where cognitive aspects take the centre stage and where parrot owners, academics and non-academics alike, come together to discuss and debate the cognitive abilities of their feathered housemates as well as the latest academic research and videos related to this topic, and as such AFC represents a valuable resource for investigators.20 In short, the plethora of videos available on YouTube videos, the materials posted on AFC along with the substantial body of research carried out by Pepperberg provide a solid basis for future research on the languaculture of home-raised Africa Greys. 24.10 A Final Observation As mentioned, the fact that mates recognise each other by their contact calls is well known. Moreover, studies have shown that adults have signature contact calls used in individual recognition (Berg et al. 2011, 2013). However, how parrots come to acquire their unique contact calls, which allow them to identify themselves to their mates and other members of the flock, has been a mystery. Similarly, it is well known that horizontal transmission of enculturated utterances can take place between parrots in the wild. Speciﬁcally, when flock members incorporate captive birds who have learned vocalisations from their human caretakers, other flock members can learn to use the utterances. According to Berg et al. (2012), in presumably all of the 350 parrot species, individuals of both sexes commonly learn vocal signals throughout life to satisfy a wide variety of social functions. In contrast, to this type of horizontal learning, previously there had been no evidence of vertical transmission from parrot parents to their offspring—that is, examples of baby parrots in the wild acquiring vocal signatures taught to them by their parents. However, this has now changed. In contrast to research on the linguistic behaviour of Greys in the wild which is still quite limited, ﬁeldwork carried 19 At present Bush (in prep.) is completing a book-length study of Chaucer’s verbal abilities, called Talking with Chaucer: A Parrot’s English, which will represent the ﬁrst in depth investigation of a home-raised Grey by a linguist and in this instance using the framework of Cultural Linguistics. 20 A second forum called Parrot Speech, although less frequented by academics, is run by Michael S. Dalton, who has written extensively on the cognitive abilities of Arielle, his Blue and Gold Macaw (Dalton 2007). 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 553 out by Karl Berg and his team in Venezuela on another species of parrots, the green-rumped parrotlets (Forpus passerinus), revealed something quite remarkable. Using video and audial recordings Berg discovered that parent birds give unique names to their children which the offspring learn. Both the baby birds and parents recognise the distinctive names, used as contact calls. After spending several months recording the sounds and activities of green-rumped parrotlets in and out of video-rigged nests, the team detected slight variations in the calls that parent birds used to communicate with different offsprings in the nest. The baby birds appeared to recognise and learn the unique, individualised calls used by their parents to address each of them. Both sexes of naive nestlings developed individually unique contact calls while still in the nest. Berg’s research has also demonstrated experimentally that signature attributes are learned from both primary caregivers: “This represents the ﬁrst experimental evidence for the mechanisms underlying the transmission of a socially acquired trait in a wild parrot population” (Berg et al. 2012: 1). Unfortunately, in contrast to the work carried out on the easily accessible and well-studied population of parrotlets in Venezuela, no such similar population of wild Greys has been available to investigators. Indeed, Greys are notoriously difﬁcult to study in the wild for in addition to being extremely shy, reclusive birds they nest in remote, hard to reach areas.21 The habitat of the Red-tailed African Grey is Central Africa, ranging from the Ivory Coast to western Kenya and northwest Tanzania, where it frequents swamps and mangrove forests while the subspecies, the Timneh African Grey (Psittacus erithacus timneh), has its range in a different region, inhabiting Western Africa, southern Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and westernmost Ivory Coast. This situation contrasts starkly with the easy accessibility to the parrots studied by Berg and his team. Moreover, the social system of these green-rumped parrotlets has been studied since 1988 at Hato Masaguaral in the state of Guarico, Venezuela where the habitat consists of tropical savannah, gallery forest and pastures. There the parrotlets commonly breed in 106 polyvinyl chloride tubes (1 m length, 0.1 m diameter) lined with hardware cloth. Thus, the researchers were able to randomly select 17 nests of 34 colour-banded adults between June and December in 2007 and 2008 for their study.22 In short, to date there is no such controlled accessibility to African Greys, their nesting habits and behaviour in the wild. As a result, we cannot say for certain whether the parents of the latter parrot species also give their children names while the babies are still in the nest. If true, this would need to be taken into consideration in the future when appraising the communication abilities of home-raised Greys. As Berg et al. (2012) suggest for their Venezuelan parrotlets, the practice presents an intriguing parallel with humans in which vocal development is often 21 For two short videos of African Greys in the wild, cf. http://www.arkive.org/african-grey-parrot/ psittacus-erithacus/video-00.html. 22 A selection of audial recordings as well as a large number of videos documenting the research of Berg and his team are available online: http://www.utb.edu/vpaa/csmt/biology/Pages/Dr–Karl-S– Berg.aspx. 554 R.M. Frank contemporaneous with parents naming infants. In any case, research on these parrotlets provides the ﬁrst example of a nonhuman animal assigning names to its offspring. Although the cognitive and linguistic implications of this type of vertical transmission of learned signatures in a wild parrot species are signiﬁcant, they are outside the scope of this introductory study. 24.11 Conclusions One of the claims of human exceptionalism has always been that we are the only animals that developed the kind of complex verbal system of communication that is manifested in human languages around the world. And that is an irrefutable fact. However, that overall claim of human exceptionalism might need to be modiﬁed somewhat in light of the cognitive abilities parrots demonstrate, the creativity that they can display once they are given access to human language and the opportunity to learn the basics of the highly complex linguistic code employed by their caretakers. As we have seen, until now one of the major focuses of research into vocal learners has been on mapping and studying the neural network that supports this ability.23 And those studies have revealed that vocal learning itself is a rare trait, found only in three distantly related groups of mammals (humans, bats and cetaceans) and three distantly related groups of birds (parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds). Moreover, as discussed above, vocal learning is also believed to be the substrate for human language. Thus, the current hypothesis concerning the relationships and evolution of brain pathways for vocal learning among birds and humans is that these brain pathways are comparable in a number of ways.24 The vocal pathways in question are not found in vocal non-learning birds and mammals. 23 On a related note, a recently published study (Olkowiecz et al. 2016) has shown that the brains of songbirds and parrots contain very large numbers of neurons, at neuronal densities considerably exceeding those found in mammals. Moreover, given that these ‘extra’ neurons are predominantly located in the forebrain, large parrots and corvids have the same or greater forebrain neuron counts as primates with much larger brains. In short, the investigators argue that such avian brains contain on average twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass and, consequently, have the potential to provide much higher ‘cognitive power’ per unit mass than do mammalian brains. Hence, it is not surprising that corvids and large parrots with their walnut-sized brains are capable of cognitive feats comparable to those of great apes. 24 Jarvis (2004b: 749) summarises these ﬁndings by saying “The three vocal learning bird groups each appear to have seven similar but not identical cerebral vocal nuclei distributed into two vocal pathways, one posterior and one anterior. Humans also appear to have a posterior vocal pathway, which includes projections from the face motor cortex to brainstem vocal lower motor neurons, and an anterior vocal pathway, which includes a strip of premotor cortex, the anterior basal ganglia, and the anterior thalamus. […] Thus, I argue that if vocal learning evolved independently among birds and humans, then it did so under strong genetic constraints of a pre-existing basic neural network of the vertebrate brain”. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 555 In contrast to the vast amount of research has been done on songbirds, on laboratory-trained Greys, and on investigating the brain pathways underlying vocal learning in general, the rich corpus of materials discussed in this chapter have not been subjected to serious study. As noted, parrots are skilled mimics, perfectly capable of memorising extended lyrics of a song and singing them, often without any indication that they understand what the words mean. Consequently, the question is not whether Greys are capable of reproducing words and phrases that they have learned from humans, but rather to what extent they understand what they have learned and whether they are able to use it meaningfully, intentionally and even creatively. And more importantly for those working in Cultural Linguistics and interested in exploring how language can be learned, this material sheds light on how cultural conceptualisations can evolve and be transmitted, in this instance from humans to their avian companions. In short, we have a corpus before us that could allow for pioneering work to be carried out, that is, as long as we take parrots seriously. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep appreciation to Virginia Bush for her insightful comments and suggestions on this chapter. In many respects the chapter draws on what I’ve learned from the highly stimulating discussions about parrot cognition I have had with her over the past three years. Online Resources (URLS) Videos of parrots Dancing parrots: Snowball: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_%28cockatoo%29. Accessed April 15, 2016. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s. Accessed April 15, 2016. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=-xwD2tyMTF4 Accessed April 15, 2016. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=cJOZp2ZftCw. Accessed April 15, 2016. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=-xwD2tyMTF4. Accessed April 15, 2016. Frostie: https://www.facebook.com/karla.larsson/videos/10202328761997126. Accessed April 15, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/FrostieTheDancingCockatoo. Accessed April 15, 2016. Miscellaneous dancing parrots: “Parrot dancing Gangnam style.” Posted May 13, 213. https://www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=qTl1asCDOgs. Accessed April 15, 2016. 556 R.M. Frank “Funny Parrots dancing compilation.” Posted April 4, 2014.https://www.YouTube. com/watch?v=7t-m4x92Nvg. Accessed April 15, 2016 Talking parrot informants: Alex and Grifﬁn: Pepperberg and Alex on NOVA: http://www.YouTube.com/watch?feature= endscreen&v=SzPiTwDE0bE&NR=1. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and Alex (on number conception and the concept of ‘none’): http:// www.YouTube.com/watch?v=P3w6OYsKJCc. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and Grifﬁn: http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=O_Fpad20Zbk. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and Alex on CNN: http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=c4gTR4tkvcM. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and Alex (counting blocks): http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v= VZ2j1jOwAYU. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and Alex at World Science Festival: http://www.YouTube.com/watch? v=hG3_CYv65cE. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg and The Alex Foundation: http://alexfoundation.org/. Accessed April 15, 2016. Einstein: “Einstein has a lot to talk about.” Posted Feb. 20, 2015. https://www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=SOb5z3fWFm4. Accessed April 15, 2016. “Einstein’s shower speech: Talking, singing, & dancing!” Posted Nov. 26, 2013: https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=fJCsI6j-8Zc. Accessed April 15, 2016. “Einstein the Parrot talking and acting silly.” Posted June 10, 2010. https://www. YouTube.com/watch?v=cdhqkWIgkLY. Accessed April 15, 2016. Halo: “African Grey swearing.” Posted Mar. 25, 2011. https://www.YouTube.com/ watch?feature=fvwp&v=nuYdJ3Ovb-E&NR=1. Accessed April 15, 2016. Jasper: “Don’t touch me!” Posted July 16, 2009. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v= hmeUSSEaxfQ. Accessed April 15, 2016. Larry: “Larry the Parrot calls out for his friend Max the Dog.” Posted April 16, 2011. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=GcbYHWUnE0I. Accessed April 15, 2016. “Larry the parrot dials an imaginary phone number, rambles a little, then starts laughing.” Posted Aug. 6, 2009. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=CB6QCzBZgc. Accessed April 15, 2016. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 557 Poppy: “Poppy the African Grey’s best talking video.” Posted Dec. 31, 2010. https://www. YouTube.com/watch?v=vWS77c5epZ0 Accessed April 15, 2016. Tui: “Tui the African Grey has a tantrum. When parrots attack! Parrot gives a verbal bashing.” Posted Dec. 30, 2007. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v= NdhlPHEIkss. Accessed April 15, 2016. References Aijmer, K. (2014). Conversational routines in English: Convention and creativity. New York: Routledge. Arbib, M. A. (2006). From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 105–167. Berg, K. S., Beissinger, S. R., & Bradbury, J. W. (2013). Factors shaping the vocal ontogeny in a wild parrot. Journal of Experimental Biology, 216, 338–345. Berg, K. S., Delgado, S., Okawa, R., et al. (2011). Contact calls are used for individual mate recognition in free-ranging green-rumped parrotlets, Forpus passerinus. Animal Behavior, 81, 241–248. Berg, K., Delgado, S., Cortopassi, K. A., et al. (2012). Vertical transmission of learned signatures in a wild parrot. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology, 279, 585–591. Burger, J. (2002). The parrot who owns me: The story of a relationship. New York: Random House. Bush, V. (In prep.). Talking with Chaucer: A parrot’s english. Bush, V. (2016). Personal Communication. Chakraborty, M., Walløe, S., Nedergaard, S. et al. (2015). Core and shell song systems unique to the parrot brain. PLoS ONE. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone. 0118496. Accessed April 15, 2016. Colbert-White, E. N., Covington, M. A., & Fragaszy, D. M. (2011). Social context influences the vocalizations of a home-raised African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 125(2), 175–184. Craige, B. J. (2010). Conversations with Cosmo: At home with an African Grey parrot. Santa Fe: Sherman Asher Publishing. Dalton, M. S. (2007). Another kind of mind: A talking bird masters English. FLA: Arielle Publishing, Clearwater. Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E. (Eds.). (2012). Viewpoint in language: A multimodal perspective. New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreifus, C. (2010). A conversation with Aniruddh D. Patel: Exploring music’s hold on the mind. New York Times (May 11, 2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01conv.html?_ r=0. Accessed April 15, 2016. Farabaugh, S. M., Linzenbold, A., & Dooling, R. J. (1994). Vocal plasticity in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus): Evidence for social factors in the learning of contact calls. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 108, 81–92. Fitch, W. T. (2000). The evolution of speech: A comparative review. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 258–267. 558 R.M. Frank Fitch, W. T. (2006). On the biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective. Music Perception, 24, 85–88. Fitch, W. T. (2009). Biology of music: Another one bites the dust. Current Biology, 19(10): R403– R404. http://dx.doi.org/410.1016/j.cub.2009.1004.1004. Accessed April 15, 2016. Fitch, W. T. (2010). The evolution of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallup, G. G. (1991). Towards a comparative psychology of self-awareness: Special limitations and cognitive consequences. In G. G. Goethals & J. Strauss (Eds.), The self: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 121–135). New York: Springer. Gardiner, J. (2010). Winging it: A memoir of caring for a vengeful parrot who’s determined to kill me. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Gallery Books. Glushko, R., Maglio, P. P., Matlock, T., et al. (2008). Categorization in the wild. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12(4), 129–135. Heidenreich, B. (2008). Understanding parrot body language. Good Bird, Inc. Hillix, W. A., & Rumbaugh, D. M. (2004). Animal bodies, human minds: Ape, dolphin and parrot language skills. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Janik, V. M., & Slater, P. J. B. (1997). Vocal learning in mammals. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 26, 59–99. Jarvis, E. D. (2004a). Evolution of brain structures for vocal learning. https://www.neuro.duke. edu/research/faculty-labs/jarvis-lab/jarvis-research/evolution-brain-structures-vocal-learning. Accessed April 15, 2016. Jarvis, E. D. (2004b). Learned birdsong and the neurobiology of human language. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1016, 749–777. Krashen, S. D. (1976). Formal and informal linguistic environments in language learning and language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 10, 157–168. Krashen, S. D., & Scarcella, R. (1978). On routines and patterns in language acquisition and performance. Language Learning, 28(2), 283–300. Lambert, W. E. (1981). Bilingualism and language acquisition. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (pp. 9–22). New York: Academy of Sciences. Lyon, C. (2014). Review of the Oxford handbook of language evolution, (eds. Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen R. Gibson). Interaction Studies, 15(1), 129–142. Müller, C., Cienki, A., Fricke, E., et al. (Eds.). (2014). Body-language-communication: An international handbook on mulitmodality in human interaction. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Nottebohm, F. (1972). The origins of vocal learning. American Naturalist, 106, 116–140. Nottebohm, F. (1975). A zoologist’s view of some language phenomena with particular emphasis on vocal learning. In E. H. Lenneberg & E. Lenneberg (Eds), Foundations of language development: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 61–104). New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press, Inc. Olkowicz, S., Kocourek, M., Lučan, R. K., et al. (2016). Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(26), 7255– 7260. Patel, A. D. (2006). Musical rhythm, linguistic rhythm and human evolution. Music Perception, 24, 99–104. Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, language, and the brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Patel, A. D. (2009). Music and the brain: Three links to language. In S. Hallam, I. Cross, M., Thaut (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of music psychology (pp. 208–216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patel, A. D. (2014). The evolutionary biology of musical rhythm: Was Darwin wrong? PLoS Biology, 12(3), e1001821. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001821. Accessed April 15, 2016. Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., et al. (2009a). Avian and human movement to music: Two further parallels. Communicative and Integrative Biology, 2(6), 1–4. Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., et al. (2009b). Experimental evidence for sychronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal. Current Biology, 19, 827–830. 24 Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics … 559 Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., et al. (2009c). Studying sychronization to a musical beat in nonhuman animals. Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 459–469. Pepperberg, I. M. (1990a). Cognition in an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus): Further evidence for comprehension of categories and labels. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 104, 42–51. Pepperberg, I. M. (1990b). Referential mapping: Attaching functional signiﬁcance to the innovative utterances of an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). Applied Psycholinguistics, 11(1), 23–44. Pepperberg, I. M. ([1999] 2002) The Alex studies: Cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey Parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pepperberg, I. M. (2003). “That damn bird”: A talk with Irene Pepperberg. Introduction by Marc D. Hauser. Southeast Texas Avian Rescue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 7rfGEtALHYs. Accessed April 15, 2016. Pepperberg, I. M. (2006). An avian parallel to primate mirror neurons and language evolution? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 141. Pepperberg, I. M. (2009). Alex and me: How a scientist and a parrot discovered a hidden world of animal intelligence—And formed a deep bond in the process. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Harper. Pepperberg, I. M. (2010a). Emergence of linguistic communication: Studies on Grey Parrots. In C. Lyon, C. L. Nehaniv, & A. Cangelosi (Eds.), Emergence of Communication and Language (pp. 355–386). London: Springer. Pepperberg, I. M. (2010b). Vocal learning in Grey parrots: A brief review of perception, production, and cross-species comparisons. Brain and Language, 115, 81–91. Pepperberg, I. M. (2011a). Avian cognition and social interaction: Fifty years of advances. Interaction Studies, 12(2), 195–207. Pepperberg, I. M. (2011b). Evolution of communication and language: Insights from parrots and songbirds. In M. Tallerman & K. Gibson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language evolution (pp. 109–119). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pepperberg, I. M., Garcia, S. E., Jackson, E. C., et al. (1995). Mirror use by African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 109, 182–195. Schackner, A., Brady, T. F., Pepperberg, I. M. et al. (2009). Spontaneous motor entrainment to music in multiple vocal mimicking species. Current Biology,19 (10), 831–836. http://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982209009154. Accessed April 15, 2016. Shariﬁan, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shariﬁan, F. (2015). Cultural Linguistics. In F. Shariﬁan (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 473–492). London, New York: Routledge. Shariﬁan, F. (2017). Cultural Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Waal, F. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Author Biography Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, co-editor of Cognitive Models in Language and Thought (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), Language and Ideology. Vol. 2. Cognitive Descriptive Approaches (John Benjamins, 2001), Body, Language and Mind, Vol. 1 Embodiment and Vol. 2 Sociocultural Situatedness (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), and author of the chapter “A future agenda for research on language and culture” in Farzad Shariﬁan (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture (Routledge, 2015). Her research areas are cultural linguistics, cognitive linguistics, ethnography and anthropological linguistics with a special emphasis on the Basque language and culture.

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously

Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS