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Everyone knows that parrots can imitate the sounds of human speech, but can they understand what words mean? A couple of decades ago, Irene Pepperberg decided to find out, with the help of Alex, a one-year-old African grey parrot. Alex is now 23, and in a new book, The Alex Studies, Pepperberg claims he doesn’t just “parrot” human speech but intentionally uses words to get what he wants. Indeed, some of his cognitive skills are on a par with those of a five-year-old child, says this University of Arizona researcher. Hard-nosed behaviourists see nothing in Alex’s performance beyond rote learning of complex associations over years of intensive training. All the same, this is a bird who spends eight hours each day bombarding his caretakers with vocal demands. If it’s not language, what is it? Gail Vines seeks enlightenment from Alex’s best friend.

How would you sum up Alex’s powers?

Emotionally, parrots act like spoilt two-year-olds. But intellectually, Alex has gone a lot further-he’s up there with chimps and dolphins. He’s doing the same tasks. It’s remarkable really. After all, chimps are genetically 98.5 per cent identical to humans, yet here is a bird that, evolutionarily speaking, is way off in left field. That’s why some people initially had trouble with my work.

What’s the most impressive thing he’s done?

It’s been a steady progression. The first thing he did was to learn to vocalise the words for a variety of objects, such as “nut”, “cork” or “wood”. Next, I taught him names for different colours and shapes, and eventually he conquered the concept of same/different. He learned to vocalise not only whether two things were the same or not, but what was the same or different about them-their shape, colour or material. Now he can do even more complex tasks. For instance, we can give him a combination of red and blue balls and blocks, and ask how many red blocks, and he’ll answer correctly, which is something children do when they’re about five. Or we give him a tray full of objects of various shapes and colours, and he can tell me which are green and three-cornered. That’s a complicated task.

But is he using language?

It’s a sterile debate. However much training this bird receives, you’re never going to be able to call him up and interview him. But what he has is at least a simple form of two-way communication. He can tell me what he wants, where he wants to go, and I can use that ability to examine his cognitive processes.

How would you describe what he’s got, if it’s not language?

Well, I think he is using some kind of symbolic code, a language-like code. What’s important is that it allows us to access his cognitive ability. It gives us a window into his reasoning processes.

Have you reached the limit of Alex’s intellectual powers?

No, he’s willing to learn more, though he’s kind of snotty sometimes, and gets bored easily. But what really holds him back in tackling new tasks is that he has to learn to form the sounds. There are many instances where we think he might have completed the task more easily if he could have pointed, for instance. Think about saying “parrot” without lips. He has to find ways of compensating.

What’s the secret of your success?

Our training technique. We use two people to demonstrate to Alex what we want him to learn. We show the bird an object and the “teacher” tells the “rival student” its name. The student learns to say the name and is given the object as a reward. We then draw Alex into being the “student”. If he learns to say the name he gets the object, which he can manipulate and chew or tear to bits-parrots in the wild spend a lot of time breaking into tough nuts or fruits and excavating nest holes. We tried training another parrot, Griffin, using videos instead of live interactions, but it was a total failure. Parrots just don’t learn from videos.

Why not?

It could be that video images appear unstable to them, almost stroboscopic, because birds have a different flicker fusion rate than humans do. As a visiting professor at MIT this year I’m going to try to work with colleagues to develop something with a flicker rate that’s better for parrots. But I suspect that even then videos won’t be as effective because they lack the social and emotional input of the live demonstration.

Can Alex read your emotions then?

I’m not sure, and I’m not sure about the emotional content of a parrot’s own vocalisations. This bird is capable of making any noise you want. In captivity they’ll reproduce the sounds of microwaves, telephones, faucets-all sorts. But in the wild they don’t mimic sounds from inanimate objects. They mimic other birds, but not the sounds of streams, for instance. Perhaps it’s only a sound’s social import that interests them. In captivity, when the microwave goes off, something interesting happens. People respond, food appears. In the wild they concentrate on making sounds that other parrots find significant.

Alex has a large vocabulary, but how can we know he knows what he’s saying?

Oh, but he does, it’s obvious, because he asks you to do things-give him certain objects or carry him somewhere in his room. If you put him somewhere else, he complains. He says, “No, wanna go shoulder.” You try to put him on a chair, and he says, “Wanna go SHOULDER.”

But does he know what the words mean? Hasn’t he just learned to associate particular sounds with particular objects or places?

If we just asked Alex what the colour of an object is, and he said “brown”, that’s a simple association. But when I give Alex a tray of objects and I ask him to find the object that is green and made of wood, his answer depends on more than a simple association. He has to think, OK, I must find something of a specific colour, and wood, not cork or wool or whatever, and then name the object that meets the two criteria. There are still people who claim this is nothing more than a series of complex associations, but that’s OK, because that’s also the way they’re interpreting what we humans do. By this argument we can never really be certain that you and I know what we mean.

Are sceptics thin on the ground now?

Well, we’ve come a long way from the reaction to my first grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health in 1977, when the referees’ comments came back essentially asking me what I was smoking. You’ve got to be kidding, they thought: “We’ve got signing chimps and singing whales and now we’re going to have a talking parrot, right?”

What has convinced people?

The mass of data. When I started out, I was barely into the project when the big controversy about ape language broke, so I knew I had to do everything with such incredible care. Here I was working with a bird. Everything had to be designed to avoid any kind of cueing, any kind of possibility that he was doing the tasks in some other way.

You mention in your book that Alex’s performance has been disappointing in relation to the “holy grail”-the creative use of words. Why do you think that is?

Yes, there’s only one example, when Alex invented a word for apple, “banerry”, which we think is a fusion of two words he already knew, “banana” and “cherry”. We don’t really know why he doesn’t spontaneously recombine object labels with us. He combines a lot of words in his private sound play. Maybe he’s so used to the training set- up that when there’s a new object he expects us to provide him with a new word.

Could your training method have implications for teaching children?

I think it might. For instance, Diane Sherman, a therapist in private practice in Monterey, California, has been using our techniques to teach communication and social skills to children who are autistic or have learning difficulties. The children have shown dramatic improvements not seen with previous types of training. One child went from just throwing tantrums to making “ma-ma” for mamma and “ma” for more, and “bu” for brother.

So is your work changing the meaning of the term “bird-brained”?

I hope so. I want to understand how a brain that is organised so differently from ours processes the same kind of information. And I hope there will be other spin-offs: perhaps the intelligence of these birds will encourage people to stop the logging, poaching and smuggling that is threatening the very survival of parrots in the wild.

Whatever attracted you to parrots in the first place?

As a child I had a parakeet. I was an only child, and we lived above a store, and there were no young children near. So this parakeet was my companion and it learned to talk. It made a great impression on me. But it was near the end of my PhD in theoretical chemistry at Harvard that the idea of studying parrots came to me. I’d watched the first television programmes on the signing chimps and the work being done with dolphins and one on why birds sing. And it just struck me that nobody was looking at these birds that could talk. You didn’t have to learn sign language to talk to them.

So while I finished my chemistry thesis, I also retrained myself in zoology and psychology. When my then husband got a job at Purdue University in Indiana, I borrowed laboratory space there, bought Alex from a pet shop, and starting writing grant proposals. I had to fight-they were saying, we hired your husband, go away. But I said, “I’m stuck here, but I want to do something with my life.” Then I won my first grant and Alex began learning labels. The rest is sort of history.

Ever regret deciding to study parrots?

It’s very labour-intensive, and you have to be extremely patient. Alex can be very uncooperative at times. I’m not very patient, so for me that was my learning curve. I had to tell myself, either you’re going to learn patience or you’re not going to get this work done. But regrets, no-what I worry about is the future of the parrots. Parrots live for about 60 years, which means that Alex and I will probably cash in about the same time. But Griffin is four-and-a-half years old. What will happen to him? I’ve set up the Alex Foundation to help to support the research but also to ensure that some years down the road the work will continue and Griffin will be looked after. People say, “Why don’t you have lots more birds?” but you can’t look after their future. There’s no question, barring accidents, that Griffin will outlive me.