Can parrots converse? Polly says that’s the wrong question

Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk.

Work by scientists quickly attracted attention — and controversy — and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the research fell out of favor.

Today, advances in technology and a growing appreciation for the sophistication of animal minds have renewed interest in finding ways to bridge the species divide.

In a cautious new paper, a team of scientists outlines a framework for evaluating whether such tools might give animals new ways to express themselves. The research is designed “to rise above some of the things that have been controversial in the past,” said Jennifer Cunha, a visiting research associate at Indiana University.

The paper, which is being presented at a science conference Tuesday, focuses on Cunha’s parrot, an 11-year-old Goffin’s cockatoo named Ellie. Since 2019, Cunha has been teaching Ellie to use an interactive “speech board,” a tablet-based app that contains more than 200 illustrated icons, corresponding to words and phrases including “sunflower seeds,” “happy” and “I feel hot.”

When Ellie presses on an icon with her tongue, a computerized voice speaks the word or phrase aloud.

In the new study, Cunha and her colleagues did not set out to determine whether Ellie’s use of the speech board amounted to communication. Instead, they used quantitative, computational methods to analyze Ellie’s icon presses to learn more about whether the speech board had what they called “expressive and enrichment potential.”

The scientists analyzed nearly 40 hours of video footage, collected over seven months, of Ellie using the speech board. Then, they compared her icon presses to several simulations of a hypothetical speech board user who was selecting icons at random.

“They were ultimately all significantly different at multiple points from the real data,” said Nikhil Singh, a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who created the models.

In other words, whatever Ellie was doing, she did not seem to be simply mashing icons at random.

Finally, the researchers tried to assess whether the speech board was serving as a form of social or cognitive enrichment for Ellie by analyzing the types of icons she selected most frequently.

Rébecca Kleinberger, an author of the paper and a researcher at Northeastern University, said, “It does seem like there was a bias toward social activity or activity that means remaining in interaction with the caretaker.”

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