Alex & Me - How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

by Irene Pepperberg

  Along the way, Alex learned to say “no” and mean it. During our first year together, Alex had several ways of communicating displeasure or negativity of some kind. When he didn’t want to be handled, for instance, he produced a high-decibel sound best conveyed as raaakkkk. He sometimes accompanied this extremely unpleasant noise with an attempt to bite, just in case his message had been misunderstood. When he didn’t want to respond to a trainer asking him to identify an object, Alex would often simply ignore the trainer: he might turn his back or indulge in some suddenly urgent preening. He indicated that he had finished with his water or with a labeled object by simply tossing it on the floor. Give him banana when he’d asked for a grape, and you were likely to end up wearing the banana. Alex was not subtle.

  Alex heard the word “no” a lot, from me or other trainers, when he incorrectly identified an object or was up to no good. By the middle of 1978 I noticed that Alex occasionally produced a “nuh” sound in situations where “no” would have been appropriate. “OK, Alex,” I said, “why don’t we train you to say it right?” Within a very few sessions, Alex replaced “nuh” with “no” in distress situations, such as not wanting to be handled. Very soon he used it to mean No, I don’t want to. Here’s an example of Alex with a well-developed sense of how to use “no.” Kandis Morton, a secondary trainer, was working with Alex in April 1979:

  K: Alex, what’s this [holding a four-corner wood]?

  A: No!

  K: Yes, what is this?

  A: Four-corner wood [indistinct].

  K: Four, say better.

  A: No.

  K: Yes!

  A: Three…paper.

  K: Alex, “four,” say “four.”

  A: No!

  K: Come on!

  A: No!

  Alex was obviously in an especially obdurate mood that day, and was using “no” to express his unwillingness to go along with the training session. (He became even more creative in this respect as he grew older.) It was amusing, unless you happened to be the trainer trying to get some work done. Alex’s use of the negative in this way represented a relatively advanced stage of linguistic development.

  A few months after this session with Kandis, I had a set-to with Alex that provoked me to write in my journal: “Alex definitely understands NO!” By this time he had developed a passion for corks. On this particular August day he obviously wanted only the best of corks to chew. I gave him a new one. He contentedly proceeded to destroy it for a couple of minutes. When it was about two-thirds gone he dropped it. “Cork,” he demanded.

  “You have a cork, Alex,” I said.

  “No!” He picked up the sizeable remnant and tossed it on the floor. If he were human, I would have added that he did it with contempt. “Cork!”

  I gave him a cork fragment, again sizeable but not complete. He snatched it from me, tossed it right back at me, and repeated even more urgently and impatiently, “Cork!” He would shut up only when I gave him a new, unblemished cork.

  “This happened all morning,” I wrote. I had wanted him to learn labels, and to express his wants. I guess I had succeeded.

  Even at this early stage in our relationship, Alex was already showing that he was no birdbrain, no matter what the scientific establishment thought.

  Chapter 4

  Alex and Me, the Vagabonds

  One challenge I faced in trying to be taken seriously in this pioneering research was my complete absence of relevant publications. In academia, published papers are the measure of worth. I had several in chemistry, but those of course wouldn’t count. By early 1979 I had enough good data on Alex’s appropriate label use that I decided to submit a short paper to the American journal Science. The journal is very prestigious, so I was aiming high. But why not? Some of the very first papers on ape-human communication, by the Gardners, David Premack, and others, had been published there in the late sixties and early seventies. Why not the first one with a parrot?

  I mailed the paper to Science in early May. It must have touched the editor’s desk for a microsecond, because it came back immediately with only a short note saying it was not of significant interest. No comments. No helpful referee’s suggestions. It obviously had not even been sent out to referees, just bounced right back. “I spend all day working on revisions, making calls, and being upset,” I wrote in my journal on May 23. I also noted that a student, Gabrielle, was working with Alex on shapes: “Poor bird—he’s really trying!”

  If Alex wasn’t giving up, then neither would I. The revision was for the journal Nature, the British counterpart to Science. The two journals are rivals, really, and don’t always agree on issues and policy. But in my case, they were in lockstep: my submission came winging its way back, not refereed, just rejected again. I was crushed and felt awful. So, apparently, did Alex, though probably for different reasons. “Alex totally bitchy,” I wrote in my journal. “Can’t get any color marking at all—everything is ROSE; GREEN and BLUE don’t exist. We can’t even test him! Yuck!” It was just a bad day; he quickly got back into stride.

  Alex could now identify objects we’d trained him to label, such as paper, wood, hide (rawhide), and key, and could label a limited set of colors. He was less interested in colors than the objects, probably because all the colors tasted the same, while the different objects had different tastes and textures. Now, could he correctly identify and name a novel combination of object and color—a blue key, for instance, whereas previously the colored keys he’d known were green, or blue objects that were something other than keys? In linguistics, this ability is known as segmentation, that is, being able to take pieces of two phrases apart and reassemble them appropriately.

  I first tried this task with an old-fashioned wooden clothespin, what in England are called clothes-pegs. He loved chewing them. We called them “peg wood,” which he picked up quickly. I then gave him a green clothespin, something he’d never seen before, and asked, “What’s this?” He looked at it and cocked his head a couple of times, obviously intrigued, as he often was with novel objects. He then looked at me and said, “Green wood peg wood,” all one phrase. We hadn’t modeled it, so this was striking. Of course, a perfect response would have been “Green peg wood.” But what he said suggested that he knew it all had to get together somehow, even if he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. When we did model the correct response for him, he got it immediately. It was a wonderful start for something quite complex linguistically, in an animal with a brain the size of a shelled walnut. Very encouraging!

  Even more encouraging was a letter on July 10. “I hear good news from NSF!” I wrote in my journal. “It looks like I will be funded for one year!” After my failed attempts with the National Institute of Mental Health, some colleagues told me that the National Science Foundation might be more interested in my research. I followed their advice, submitting a proposal early in 1979. And now I had succeeded. I was excited. I ran around shouting and clapping my hands. Poor Alex had no idea what was going on, of course, and was terrified by my wild behavior. “It’s OK, Alex,” I said. “Don’t be frightened. We’re funded. We’re gonna be all right!” He did not look convinced.

  My initial struggles with getting funded and published were happening at a time of growing controversy in the field of ape-human communication. Questions were being posed about its legitimacy. Leaders in the field—the Gardners, David Premack, Roger Fouts, Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage, Lyn Miles, and Penny Patterson—had employed a variety of methods for communicating with their simian subjects: hand signing in some cases, arbitrary symbols in others. The apes appeared to have demonstrated significant progress not only in labeling objects but also in creating novel phrases. The chimpanzee known as Washoe, for instance, in the care of Roger Fouts, had apparently coined the phrase “water bird” the first time she saw a swan; Koko the gorilla, the subject of Penny Patterson’s research, seemingly described a zebra as a “white tiger.” These efforts were garnering a lot of public attention (NOVA programs were ju
st part of that; magazine and newspaper articles proliferated, too). Yet linguists were expressing a growing unease over the claim that these animals had demonstrated a rudimentary facility for language.

  The subject of language has always been a contentious topic, scientifically but also emotionally. For both some scientists and laypersons, spoken language has long been held sacrosanct as being uniquely human, a defining character of what separates “us” (humans) from “them” (all other creatures). Too, a long-running debate exists about the more arcane issue of defining language. After all, other animals communicate with each other, often vocally. Is that not a form of language? I don’t want to get bogged down in these controversies here. I just want to note that the rumblings of the gathering storm were getting louder and louder.

  I was aware of the issues, of course, but not their scale when I initially set out on my journey. The first page of my Purdue journal naively proclaimed, “Project ALEX: Avian Language Experiment.” That’s how Alex became Alex—not, as many people assumed, a play on “smart alec.” His name was an acronym for where my research seemed to be heading: namely, I planned to develop parrot-human communication, using labels, as had been done with apes. That sounds a bit like language, doesn’t it? And that was how the ape researchers had been expressing their goals and achievements. It was natural that I would follow their path.

  But criticism began to mount, becoming ever more strident. Did the ape-language work have anything at all to do with language? The researchers might simply be deluding themselves—or worse, it was implied. I quickly realized that adopting terms the ape-language people were employing was probably unwise. It could distract from my real aim: namely, to explore the cognitive capacities of a nonhuman, nonprimate, nonmammalian animal, using communication as a window into his mind. I realized I needed to be careful about the terms I used in public and scholarly contexts.

  About a year into the project, for instance, I started telling people who asked about the name Alex that it stood for “avian learning experiment,” not “avian language experiment”—less provocative. In scholarly settings, I was ever more careful to describe Alex’s vocal productions as “labels,” not “words.” And the post-Science, post-Nature draft of the paper would be titled “Functional Vocalizations by an African Grey Parrot.” I thought it prudent. Words can be labels, and labels can be words. They can also be dangerous.

  I sent the draft of my now lengthy article to a German journal, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, in January 1980. A colleague had reminded me that it was where Todt had published his paper on the model/rival technique on which Alex’s training was based.

  Interestingly, about a month earlier, at the end of November 1979, Science had published a long paper by Herbert Terrace and several colleagues: “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” It was to become a classic in the growing controversy. No one is more zealous than a convert, and Herb Terrace became such a convert. A leading psychologist at Columbia University in New York, Terrace had, until this point, been a strong advocate for the field of ape language, based on his initial research with an ape known as Nim Chimpsky (a play on the name of Noam Chomsky, the prominent linguist). Terrace’s arguments were certain to be taken seriously. The Science paper was Terrace’s mea culpa: his answer to the title’s question was a resounding no! Terrace had analyzed Nim’s hand-signing output in excruciating detail. He had expected to find evidence of grammar in Nim’s supposedly spontaneous “utterances”: instead, he said, the data were the product of unintentional cuing by his human handlers. That is, Nim was subtly following his handlers’ leads, not spontaneously communicating on his own.

  Terrace’s Science paper was a huge blow to ape-language research, the first of two such blows in a six-month period. The second was even more devastating, both in its scale and in the sharp-edged language it employed to eviscerate the credibility of the field. It came in the form of a major conference, organized by linguist Thomas Sebeok and psychologist Robert Rosenthal, under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences in May 1980. The name of the conference was “The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes and People.” It was a huge gathering of leading scientists, organized to denounce the work of the animal-language researchers: part of the bias that “they” cannot talk—only “we” can.

  I eagerly attended the conference, partly because I hoped to meet some of the prominent researchers for the first time. It also introduced me to some of the younger people in the field, such as Diana Reiss, an expert on dolphin communication. Diana and I became instant and long-lasting friends. She and I were aware of the approaching assault on our field. But neither of us was prepared for the vitriolic atmosphere hovering over the audience in the elegant rooms of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel during those extremely tense days.

  Clever Hans was a German horse that performed in vaudeville acts in the 1900s. His owner, Wilhelm von Osten, would invite questions from the audience. Sometimes the questions were numerical, to which some number, say one to twelve, was the answer. Clever Hans would then tap out the answer with his hoof, stopping at the appropriate number. Clever Hans was a sensation. A horse that could add and subtract! A horse that understood questions in German! How did he do it? The answer, it turned out, was that when Hans reached the right answer, Osten involuntarily tilted his head a small fraction of an inch, and the horse detected it. The remarkable thing was that Osten was entirely unaware of his own head movement—it was an unconscious response. Without knowing it, Osten was cuing Clever Hans, whose cleverness was not arithmetic but highly developed visual perception.

  It didn’t take a detective to discern Sebeok’s and Rosenthal’s opinion of the field of animal-human communication, given their choice of conference title and what that implied. That the list of speakers included experts on training circus animals and a magician served to reinforce that conclusion. Sebeok and his wife, Jean Umiker-Sebeok, circulated a manuscript prior to the conference in which they suggested that ape-language researchers had “involved themselves in rudimentary circus-like performances.” A reporter for Science, Nicholas Wade, later wrote, “It’s amazing that any of the ape-language researchers should even have considered stepping into such a lion’s den.” Actually, most did not. Only Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage showed up as speakers.

  Diana and I sat openmouthed—figuratively, if not literally—as these academic icons flung themselves into battle. “Vituperative criticism” was how Sue Savage described the Sebeoks’ assault, “replete with errors, both technical and logical.” Their comments “embarrassingly reveal their incompetence,” she added. Sebeok summed up his position in a postconference press gathering: “The alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Herbert Terrace.”

  Whoa! I knew science could be contentious. But this? In Diana’s report to her department she wrote: “One conclusion is to question whether scientists can communicate with one another, let alone with animals.” In retrospect, I understood why editors at both Science and Nature had wanted absolutely nothing to do with my manuscript; they knew that this academic excoriation was coming over the horizon. Thank goodness I got my NSF grant before all this hit, I thought. Thank goodness my new manuscript is in the hands of editors of a journal that see merit in asking questions about animal thinking and can see value in our methods.

  Photographic Insert

  Once more, for the camera: “What number is purple?” Photo by William Munoz

  Now for some number comprehension: “What object two?” Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  Alex in Arizona with Sandy Myskowski and Irene, demonstrating a model/rival session for a photoshoot. Photo by William Munoz

  Alex, on left, helps train Griffin: “Talk clearly!” Photo by William Munoz

  An addition trial, but Alex is more interested in the photographer than the task at hand. Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  Phoneme work, as in the (in)famous “
n-u-t” incident: “What sound is blue?” Photo by Jenny Pegg

  Alex on Irene’s hand, eyeing his cage, as the camera flashes in his face. Immediately after the picture, he says, “Wanna go back!” Photo by Karla Zimonja

  Staging a number question for the camera. In a field of red, green, and blue wooden blocks: “How many red blocks?” Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  Kyaaro (left), Alex (on hand), and Griffin (a baby at one year old) with Irene, mugging for the camera. Photo by William Munoz

  Kyaaro, with Diana May and Irene, asking for his favorite reward for a good session: “You tickle.” Photo by William Munoz

  Alex on top of his cage with his excavated box, playing with sounds and practicing a new label. Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  “Rose” is the answer to “What color smaller?” And Alex gets to chew it to bits. Photo by William Munoz

  Yet again, for the camera: “What matter is green and four corner?” The answer is wood. Photo by William Munoz

  Alex in an iconic “mug” shot: The mug acted like an echo chamber, amplifying sounds when he put his head inside and talked. Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe