Anim Cogn. 2015 Dec 23. [Epub ahead of print]
Abstract
Communicative
competence is one measure of an individual's ability to navigate
conversations with social partners. The current study explored the
possibility of basic communicative competence in a non-mammal speaker, a
speech-using African Grey parrot. Spontaneous conversations between one
Grey named Cosmo and her caregiver were recorded, from which three
corpora (i.e., bodies of text) of Cosmo's vocalizations were developed:
(1) Baseline: Vocalizations containing no requests, (2) Ignored
Requests: Vocalizations immediately following Cosmo's caregiver ignoring
Cosmo's requests, and (3) Denied Requests: Vocalizations immediately
following Cosmo's caregiver denying Cosmo's requests. The distributions
of social (e.g., "I love you," kiss sounds) and nonsocial (e.g.,
answering machine beeps, "That's squirrel")
vocalizations, as well as speech and nonword vocalizations, were
statistically different across the three corpora. Additionally,
qualitative analysis of the datasets indicated Cosmo was persistent in
repeating vocalizations when denied and ignored, and interrupted her
caregiver more often when requests were denied compared to ignored.
Neither repetition nor interruption occurred during the Baseline
conversations. The data indicate that despite the outcome being the same
(i.e., request was unmet), Cosmo treated an ignored request differently
than a denied request, modifying her vocalizations in accord with the
specific context. Such modification is evidence of basic communicative
competence.
