Name-calling parrots

“We didn’t set out to study name use,” said the study’s lead author, Lauryn Benedict, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado, where she studies animal communication and social behavior.

“We started studying parrot vocal learning and cognition in 2020 with the ‘What Does Polly Say?’ survey that asks about the sounds, words, and phrases that parrots learn from humans,” Professor Benedict told me in email.

“Since then, we’ve added new collaborators and a second survey called the ‘Bird Singalong and Speech Project’ that collects recordings of talking or singing birds,” Professor Benedict explained in email. “With both of these projects we are asking questions about what different species and individual birds can learn.”

Instead of going to the tropics to record and decipher wild parrot chatter, as did Professor Benedict’s long-time collaborator, Christine Dahlin (I recently shared Professor Dahlin’s studies of vocal communication in wild amazon parrots), Professors Benedict and Dahlin were joined by a team of researchers based at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences and together, they analyzed vocalizations produced by 889 companion parrots that were collected by the ManyParrots project. This online project was originally inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. (Read more about that study’s findings here.)

There are specific meanings in parrot utterances

“Wild parrots use vocal signals to organize their complicated social lives. Companion parrots do the same,” Professor Benedict elaborated in email. “Although companion parrots are generally talking to humans instead of other parrots, we expect that they have the same learning and cognitive processes as wild birds. And because they speak to us in human language, we can measure and understand the meaning of their signals much better than we can with wild birds. That makes companion parrots a hugely valuable research resource.”

“We started by asking people to tell us generally what their parrots ‘say’ and we got a lot of responses that included names,” Professor Benedict elaborated in email. “It was immediately obvious that parrots often learn names from humans, both their own names and the names of people and animals in their households. This is really interesting to us because it makes clear that names are meaningful both to parrots and the humans who talk to them.”

Amateur scientists (formerly referred to as “citizen scientists”) provided a variety of vocalizations that their chatty parrot companions uttered.

“People gave us examples of the sounds, words, and phrases used by 884 parrots of 78 species,” Professor Benedict replied in email. “We didn’t ask for a complete list of all the words and phrases used by each bird, so the examples we got were whatever the survey-takers wanted to report.”

Professor Benedict and collaborators discovered that many of the companion parrots surveyed used names to identify individuals — just like people do.

“About half (47%) of the reports included examples of name use, suggesting that a lot of birds use names, and their human companions find that meaningful,” Professor Benedict reported. “It’s also possible that even more of those 884 birds use names and it just wasn’t reported to us.”

Of those audio 413 clips, 88 parrots appeared to be using names as labels for people and animals. Professor Benedict and collaborators also found strong evidence that some birds applied names not only to a particular category, such as “people,” but to a single individual.

“Interestingly, though, not all birds used names correctly, and the mistakes in name use were sometimes very revealing,” Professor Benedict said in email. “For example, some birds used the name of one dog to refer to all dogs, suggesting that they understood the dog’s name as a cognitive label for dogs as a group. Other birds used their own names when seeking attention, much as a toddler named Polly might say ‘Polly hungry’ at mealtime. In these cases the birds didn’t use names exactly as most humans do, but they did use them in relevant contexts.”

Ultimately, this research suggests that parrots do have the cognitive and vocal skills to use names in different ways, from communicating with people to even talking about someone who isn’t present.

As I read this study, I was surprised to learn that my female Congo Grey Parrots may be a bit … different. They are far less chatty than the males — females preferring to mimic sounds (whistles, tongue clicks, electronic beeps, squeaks, etc.) rather than vocal mimicry. Was something similar reported by your survey respondents?

“We have noticed this on a species level, but not by sex,” Professor Benedict replied in email. “Our 2022 study analyzed the vocal repertoires of males and females and found no differences by sex across most species, including grey parrots (ref).”

“We did find that in a few species there are interesting sex differences, though,” Professor Benedict added in email. “For example, budgie and galah males are more talkative than females. At the species level, cockatiels, Fischer’s lovebirds, and Senegal parrots all copy more sounds than language-based phrases. We haven’t looked to see exactly what kinds of sounds are preferred — that is a great follow up research question!”

Nonetheless, this study provided Professor Benedict and collaborators with a few surprises.

“I was surprised by how frequently people reported that companion parrots communicate using names,” Professor Benedict explained in email. “Many people told us that their parrots correctly use names for multiple people or animals. Clearly some birds recognize the individuality of others and can understand the concept of a name as a label.”

One of the benefits to people from using proper names is the ability to more readily organize our complex social interactions. A variety of wild animals likewise use sounds in ways that are at least analogous to names, and for seemingly the same reason.

However, that said, we cannot conclude that such name use is analogous to human names both because animal vocal signals are often so different and because we don’t understand the full intent behind their signals.

The variation across species and even across individuals of the same species, however, inspires plenty of questions about how, when and why animals do or don’t use these skills to call out another creature by name.

Source:

Lauryn Benedict, Viktoria Groiss, Marisa Hoeschele, Eva Reinisch, and Christine R. Dahlin (2026). Name use by companion parrots. PLOS One 21(4):e0346830 | doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0346830

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