The Truth About Animals

Communication

Can any animals talk and use language

like humans?
Animals as diverse as elephants and
parrots can mimic the sounds of human
speech. But can any of them
understand what they are saying?

By Shreya Dasgupta
16 February 2015

In April 2010, Adriano Lameira set up his video camera in

front of an enclosure at Cologne Zoo in Germany. Inside was
an orangutan called Tilda.
There was a rumour that Tilda could whistle like a human,
and Lameira, of Amsterdam University in the Netherlands,
was keen to capture it on camera. But as the camera kept
rolling, Tilda did much more than just whistle. She clapped

her hands, smacked her lips, and let out a series of deepthroated human-like garbled sounds: almost like someone
who had inhaled sulphur hexafluoride, a gas that makes your
voice deeper
Lameira was baffled. "These were not only very different from
whatever we have heard from wild orangutans so far, but we
could also see some similarities with human speech," he
says.
Tilda wasn't the first animal that seemed to be able to mimic
human speech. A handful of other species also make noises
that sound like talking, including elephants and beluga whales
to say nothing of parrots.
These animals seem capable of bridging the language barrier
that separates us. And their attempts at speaking like us
make them quite irresistible. But can they really "talk" as we
do? It's not just a matter of being able to make the sounds. To
really count as talking, the animals would have to understand
what they mean.
Tilda was born around 1965, captured from the island of
Borneo and raised in captivity. She is among the first of our
closest cousins known to have successfully imitated humanlike sounds.
Lameira's team found that her calls were strikingly similar to
human speech. Their rapid rhythm precisely matched that of
humans speaking. Moreover, she seemed to be stringing
together vowel and consonant-like sounds. That is a
precursor to how we build syllables, words and sentences,
Lameira says.
Nevertheless, her calls are far from being a perfect imitation
of our speech. But she is not the only mimic out there.
Famously, parrots are good at, well, parroting.

The undisputed champion of speech mimicry was an African

grey parrot called Alex. He was trained by cognitive scientist
Irene Pepperberg of Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Alex could quickly learn and imitate new
English words. He could even say "I love you", and wished
Pepperberg good night after a hard day's training. When Alex
passed away in 2007 at the age of 31, fans from all over the
world mourned.

Other mimics use completely

different mechanisms
So what makes parrots like Alex such proficient
impressionists?

Part of the answer lies in their vocal tract, says Pepperberg.

"Their vocal tract's complex musculature, and their thick, yet
flexible, tongue may help them produce human speech
sounds more easily," she says.
However, other mimics use completely different mechanisms
to make the sounds. Take Noc, a beluga whale at Vancouver
Aquarium in Canada, whose speaking abilities were
described in 2012. Captured young by Inuit hunters and
raised in captivity till his death in 1999, Noc would over-inflate
his nasal cavities to produce human-like sounds.
One elephant can also mimic human speech, using yet
another method. Described in 2012, Koshik produces
several words of Korean by placing the tip of his trunk into
his mouth to modulate his vocal tract.
By doing so, he accurately matches both the pitch and timbre
patterns of his trainers' voices, says Angela Stger-Horwath
of the University of Vienna in Austria. This is remarkable, she
says, considering that elephants' vocal tracts are anatomically

different from ours: they are longer, and they have a trunk
instead of lips.
Despite their different styles of imitations, these animals do
have something in common. They are all "vocal learners".
That is, they hear sounds, learn to imitate them, and then
produce them.

Many animals only produce the

calls that they are born with
Humans, the best vocal learners, can learn and produce
countless different sounds. Beluga whales and dolphins also
naturally learn hundreds of new vocalizations throughout their
lives. Some parrots and songbirds are prolific learners as
well, sometimes even picking up sounds from other species
and objects around them. Famously, lyrebirds have learned
to mimic the sounds of human machines like camera
shutters and chainsaws.
Other vocal learners are much less skilled. While Grey
parrots can learn and produce thousands of calls, zebra
finches learn only a few songs as fledglings, which they
stick to during their entire lifetime. What's more, many vocal
learners can only imitate sounds from their own species.
Most animals are not vocal learners. They only produce the
calls that they are born with: for example, cows moo, dogs
bark, and pigeons coo. These animals are unable to imitate
new sounds.
So what is it about some animals' brains that allows them to
imitate speech?
The key region is in the forebrain, says Erich Jarvis of Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina. There are particular

brain circuits that control the muscles for vocalizations, and

only some animals have them.
In a 2004 paper, Jarvis described a region of the forebrain
that makes direct connections with the voice muscles in
both humans and parrots. These brain circuits help them
learn new sounds, and then control their vocal tract muscles
to produce the learned sounds. Animals that are not vocal
learners lack these forebrain pathways. They only have
circuits in the brainstem, the most primitive part of the brain,
that may control their innate calls.
This is reflected in the animals' genes. In 2014, Jarvis and his colleagues studied how
genes are turned on and off in the brains of different animals. A set of over 50 genes
showed a similar pattern of activity in the speech-control centres of several vocal
learners, including humans, parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds. This means
humans use the same genes to speak as songbirds use to sing. Animals that can't
learn new sounds, like chickens and macaques, don't activate these genes in the same
way, Jarvis says.

Strangely, great apes are not great mimics, even though they
are our closest relatives and their brains are similar to ours.
Apart from Tilda, most non-human primates show no sign of
the advanced mimicry that humans and parrots can do.

Their voice box can produce

many of the different sounds
that we can

For a long time, researchers believed that their vocal organs

were the issue. Their vocal tract is similar to ours, but studies
in the 20th century had suggested that their voice boxes do
not descend as far as ours do.
But that's not true, says Jarvis. In 2003, researchers found that the voice boxes of
baby chimpanzees descend soon after birth, just like those of humans.

"Theoretically their voice box can produce many of the

different sounds that we can," says Jarvis. "But they just
don't." Either apes don't have the forebrain pathways involved

in vocal learning, he says, or the pathways are non-functional

for some reason.
In fact, when we list the species that can learn to produce
new sounds, they are quite far apart on the evolutionary tree.
Five groups of mammals can do it: humans, bats, elephants
and seals, plus cetaceans like dolphins and whales. There
are also three groups of birds that can do vocal learning:
parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds.
So vocal learning looks like a case of convergent evolution: it
probably evolved independently in the different groups of
animals, rather than just once in their common ancestor. So
why did they bother?
So vocal learning looks like a case of convergent evolution: it
probably evolved independently in the different groups of
animals, rather than just once in their common ancestor. So
why did they bother?
Most "talking" animals belong to highly social species, says
Diana Reiss of Hunter College in New York. But in captivity,
they are separated from their own kind with only humans to
interact with.
So humans become their models for imitation, says Lameira.
"Copying human sounds is like doing what your peers are
doing."
Imitating human sounds may also be a way to bond with
people, says Stger-Horwath. She thinks that is why Koshik
the elephant does it.
The same may be true of a beluga whale called Nack,
according to his trainer Tsukasa Murayama of Tokai
University in Kanagawa, Japan. Nack can imitate rudimentary
Japanese words and sounds, including a weak rendition of
"Tsukasa". Murayama thinks this is a way of playing with us,
as Nack does not get any explicit rewards for doing it.

In the wild, too, vocal learners use their many calls to bond
with other members of their species. The ability to learn new
sounds also allows them to change their vocalizations, for
instance if they need to join new flocks, says Pepperberg
Their vocal skills could make them more attractive to the opposite sex, by
demonstrating their intelligence, says Jarvis. "I think something like that exists in
humans, where you have guys or girls who are trying to show off how smart and how
intelligent they are with all the information they have. I think that's what mimicry is
about."

Where all these animals fall down, it seems, is the way they
use the words they have learned. They don't know what they
mean, and are simply parroting them without understanding.

You can teach your dog to

understand the words "sit" or
"fetch the newspaper"
Koshik's behaviour illustrates this clearly. He has been trained
by his carers to obey commands, so he has learned that
when a carer says "nuo", the Korean word for "lie down", he
should lie down. Koshik can also say the word "nuo", having
learned to imitate it. But he cannot use the word meaningfully.
"He does not expect the keepers to lie down when he
produces the imitation 'nuo'," Stger-Horwath says.
In this respect, Koshik is quite a normal animal. You can teach your dog to understand
the words "sit" or "fetch the newspaper", says Jarvis. But the dog cannot imitate these
words, let alone use them to tell you what to do.

There is one glaring exception to this rule: Alex the parrot.

Not only could he say dozens of English words clearly, he
used them to identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers.

They learn words and then use

them to ask for toys or treats
they want

Following Alex's death, his trainer Pepperberg has begun

working with two new African grey parrots: 20-year-old Griffin
and 2-year-old Athena. The idea, Pepperberg says, is to ask
questions of the birds, just as we can ask questions of small
children. She hopes to find out "the extent to which they
understand concepts such as 'bigger or smaller', and 'same or
different', how much they understand about numbers, optical
illusions, probability."
Mimicking human sounds may have an extra benefit for these
parrots, above and beyond simple bonding, says Pepperberg.
It gives them control over their lives. They learn words and
then use them to ask for toys or treats they want, or to go to
specific places.
Clearly, African grey parrots operate on a far high level than
any other animal mimic. Nobody yet knows how or why this
one species of parrot can do what other animals cannot.
What is clear, however, is that vocal mimicry is the basis of
human language. Our imitative skills allow us to learn and
reproduce a huge range of sounds. It is this vast repertoire
that allows human languages to have such immense
vocabularies, all the way from "at" to
"pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis".
We don't yet know when our speech and language evolved.
Could our ape-like ancestors, such as Australopithecus,
talk? What about more recent species like the Neanderthals?

Some animals can mimic the

sounds of human speech
Tilda could help resolve this question. Clearly, the sounds she
imitated are not massively difficult for orangutans, says
Lameira. That suggests that the ability to produce them

evolved before the orangutan lineage split from the lineage

that gave rise to humans. "This can give us a sort of timeline
of speech evolution," says Lameira.
Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the ability to mimic
sounds is ancient. Many of the mechanisms involved, such as
the ability to control the noises you make, are basic and many
animals have them.
The truth seems to be that some animals can mimic the sounds of human speech, but
only a tiny minority can talk meaningfully as humans do. These less capable animals
are just as fascinating as the truly skilled, because they could reveal how our own
language skills evolved.