008kenichijouji
New member
Okay, so I get to thinking of random questions...and then I try to approach them scientifically and think of how I could observe and experiment.... I'm not too sure how much merit my weird thoughts truly have, or what good they'd do, but here's my latest thinking.
I'm a fan of all parrots, my favorites being macaws, but the African Grays just get me with their special talents. I've read the stuff on Alex and a couple of other especially gifted ones, and I just loved the research and results they'd found on these little fellas.
I'm only a native speaker of English, but I learned enough Latin to be proficient, and the same goes with Japanese (I'm better at Japanese than Latin but...). Took some Mandarin too, and am taking in a bit of Korean and Cantonese as well, but...life takes a big chunk out of my learning time.
However, I still consider myself to be somewhat of a polyglot.
Anyway, I got to thinking....have there been any experiments or is there currently any research on how African Grays can handle multiple languages, while maintaining the understanding of phrases? Also, I wonder if it is possible that AG's learn one of our human languages better than others, and why?
Reason I got to thinking this is because I was looking at videos of African Grays owned by people in other countries, and the Japanese-speaking ones didn't sound as clear/coherent as their English-speaking relatives. My boyfriend is Chinese and is a native Cantonese speaker, and he noted that the tones for the Cantonese-speaking Grays are slightly off, which surprised me because generally, don't they mimic sounds rather well? Cantonese is very difficult to pick up because of how many tones there are, and a word's meaning is wholly dependent on what tones one uses... I wonder if all the tones are harder for the birds to pick up, whereas in English, we don't rely on that sort of thing.
I dunno, just something to think about... If anyone knows of anything related to this, please post! I would like to adopt a Gray anyway, but I'd be very curious to have some language experiments going on... Between my boyfriend and I, we'd have a few languages being spoken to test with. Haha.
I'm a fan of all parrots, my favorites being macaws, but the African Grays just get me with their special talents. I've read the stuff on Alex and a couple of other especially gifted ones, and I just loved the research and results they'd found on these little fellas.
I'm only a native speaker of English, but I learned enough Latin to be proficient, and the same goes with Japanese (I'm better at Japanese than Latin but...). Took some Mandarin too, and am taking in a bit of Korean and Cantonese as well, but...life takes a big chunk out of my learning time.
However, I still consider myself to be somewhat of a polyglot. Anyway, I got to thinking....have there been any experiments or is there currently any research on how African Grays can handle multiple languages, while maintaining the understanding of phrases? Also, I wonder if it is possible that AG's learn one of our human languages better than others, and why?
Reason I got to thinking this is because I was looking at videos of African Grays owned by people in other countries, and the Japanese-speaking ones didn't sound as clear/coherent as their English-speaking relatives. My boyfriend is Chinese and is a native Cantonese speaker, and he noted that the tones for the Cantonese-speaking Grays are slightly off, which surprised me because generally, don't they mimic sounds rather well? Cantonese is very difficult to pick up because of how many tones there are, and a word's meaning is wholly dependent on what tones one uses... I wonder if all the tones are harder for the birds to pick up, whereas in English, we don't rely on that sort of thing.
I dunno, just something to think about... If anyone knows of anything related to this, please post! I would like to adopt a Gray anyway, but I'd be very curious to have some language experiments going on... Between my boyfriend and I, we'd have a few languages being spoken to test with. Haha.
