[alerted by David Pesetsky]
The BBC has a piece on N’kisi, an African grey parrot, who “has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour. … He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope — just as a human child would do. N’kisi’s remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine. N’kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.”
A quick Google search reveals that years ago, the parrot was the subject of a “USA Today article”:http://www.usatoday.com/life/2001-02-12-parrot.htm, particulary about his psychic abilities. See “this message”:http://www.csicop.org/list/listarchive/msg00168.html from CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
N’kisi’s homepage describes some experiments. Apparently none of this has been published in any scientific journal. I don’t know what the BBC means by the teaser line “The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.”
Update: Mark Liberman now has an “entry”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000398.html on Language Log on the parrot as well, mostly about the ludicrous claim in the BBC article that “About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N’kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.”
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This entry was posted by fintel on Monday, January 26th, 2004, at 5:50 pm.
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