Neoprene

Angeregt durch einen großen Magazinartikel in der Berliner Zeitung vom Wochenende habe ich einiges gefunden zu einem der interessantesten Graupapageien der Wissenschaft der letzten Jahre: Cosmo, ein weiblicher Vogel von Prof. Betty Jean Craige, über die Dr. Erin Colbert-White ihre Doktorarbeit geschrieben hat:

A toddler who is learning to organize words and phrases will often practice speaking when left alone, a tendency that many believed to be uniquely human. But a study by the University of Georgia’s Erin Colbert-White has challenged that assumption: She found that African gray parrots may also engage in self-speech that is functionally and structurally similar to that of children.
„We’re not alone, and we’re not as special as we thought,“ says Colbert-White, who presented her research at the International Conference on Comparative Cognition and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics in March. „Other animals can do fascinating things, like practicing a completely foreign communications system when there’s no reward for doing it.“
To compare parrot and child self-speech, Colbert-White analyzed four hours of recordings of Emily, a 2-year-old girl, and four hours of Cosmo, a parrot. Colbert-White found that, when left alone, both the bird and the child corrected their language mistakes. For example, Cosmo was recorded saying „Betty has feathers and Cosmo has hair,“ before whistling and correcting the sentence. Emily engaged in similar exercises, correcting her words and phrases for pronunciation and syntax.
That said, Emily was more likely to use her vocabulary to create complex sentences with prepositions and conjunctions. Cosmo generally used nouns and created gibberish from a smaller pool of words, Colbert-White found.
„We think of [African gray] parrots as pets,“ says Colbert-White, „but they are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.“

http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2010/11/research.aspx

Home-raised African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) exhibit strong social bonding with their human companions. We examined how 1 parrot’s vocal production (speech and nonword sounds) changed with social context with respect to descriptive measures of the vocalizations and their thematic content. We videotaped the parrot in 4 social conditions: subject home alone, subject and owner in the same room, owner in a separate room within hearing range, and owner and experimenter conversing in the same room as the parrot but ignoring her. Linguistic analysis revealed the parrot’s repertoire consisted of 278 “units” ranging in length from 1 to 8 words or sounds. Rate of vocalization and vocabulary richness (i.e., the number of different units used) differed significantly, and many vocalizations were context-specific. For example, when her owner was in the room and willing to reciprocate communication, the parrot was more likely to use units that, in English, would be considered solicitations for vocal interaction (e.g., “Cosmo wanna talk”). When she and her owner were in separate rooms, the subject was significantly more likely to use units that referenced her spatial location and that of her owner (e.g., “Where are you”), suggesting she uses specific units as an adaptation of the wild parrot contact call. These results challenge the notion that parrots only imitate speech and raise interesting questions regarding the role of social interaction in learning and communicative competence in an avian species … Although Cosmo is only one parrot, our results demonstrate for the first time that it is within the abilities of a nonhuman, nonprimate, nonmammal species that has been raised with a responsive human conversational partner in a home rather than a lab to use a variety of speech and nonword sounds in a deliberate, contextually relevant fashion. Moreover, despite the fact that Cosmo was not explicitly taught the vocalizations that she uses to communicate with B.J. (in contrast to many of the words produced by lab-reared parrots), she has still developed more than a surface, auditorybased understanding of the units in her repertoire. That is, she has picked up how to produce numerous utterances in an arguably context-appropriate manner. Our findings stress the important role that socialization plays in learning to communicate. They also suggest that a primate, or even mammalian, brain may not be necessary for an individual to develop aspects of vocal communicative competence.

Journal of Comparative Psychology: Social Context Influences the Vocalizations of a Home-Raised African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus)
http://psychology.uga.edu/primate/research/pdf/Colbert-White%20et%20al.,%202011.pdf
Als Nachtrag noch eine schöne Kinderstunde über Cosmo und Betty Jean Craige:
„Cosmo the African Grey asks for peanuts, even tells jokes“
http://onlineathens.com/stories/101208/liv_342183948.shtml