Can 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 deep-throated 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 human-
like 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 Stöger-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?
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 Stöger-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'," Stöger-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.