New Delhi: Your pet parrot isn’t just repeating after you or mimicking your moves, it may have a name for you and other birds, says a new study by researchers from multiple universities.
In the study, published in the journal PLOS One on 17 April, bioacoustics researchers shed new light on the social and cognitive abilities of parrots. They found that parrots, known for their chirpy personality, can use names to identify specific people like their owners and may also repeat their own names to draw attention.
For the study, Lauryn Benedict, a biology professor at the University of Northern Colorado, focussed on pet parrots who are used to listening to human voices and repeating names.
Assisted by Christine Dahlin from University of Pittsburgh and a team of researchers from Austria, Benedict analysed vocalisation samples from over 889 parrots. The data was provided by the ManyParrots project, which is a network that studies the vocal behaviour, learning, and cognition ability of parrots with the help of audio recordings and surveys.
Of the total samples, 413 recordings were of parrots saying names. Researchers observed that in 88 of these recordings, parrots appeared to be taking names to identify specific people or animals.
“Although we know that wild parrots and some other animals have vocal signatures and can even use them to direct communication to other individuals, it is difficult to state precisely that they use names in the same manner as humans,” Dahlin told Popular Science.
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Ability to adapt
The study suggests that the parrots did not just have names for broad groups of people, but they had learned to identify individuals using labels.
But these birds do not always use names for the purposes that humans do. Researchers also found evidence that parrots can take names for different purposes, adapting to circumstances — like repeating their own names to attract attention from their pet parents.
“We found that many parrots can learn and apply names appropriately, with 88 different individuals using names appropriately, sometimes for single individuals (both humans and other animals). However, parrots also used names in contexts that are atypical for humans, often using their own name as a means to seek attention,” said Dahlin.
Dahlin added that since parrots are known to be social creatures, it is possible for wild parrots to possess this ability of using names.
Parrots now may be the latest creatures who are known to use names. Earlier studies suggest that elephants, marmosets, and bottlenose dolphins also call each other using names.