Bibliofreakblog

Alex & Me by Dr. Irene Pepperberg

I’m sure that a lot of people out there in the blogosphere will review this book with an eye towards the story” the relationship between Alex the grey parrot and Dr. Irene Pepperberg; Pepperberg’s struggle for funding and acceptance in the scientific community; the tragic untimely death of Alex.  But I’m going to focus on the linguistic implications of the duo’s work, because that’s why I wanted to read this book in the first place.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy the story behind Pepperberg’s work with Alex.  I had long heard that, trying to keep a scientific objectivity, Pepperberg asked the pet store owner to pick out an African grey parrot, so I liked her retelling of it, and that he picked Alex mostly because he was closest and easiest to grab.  

But really, I liked learning about Alex’s achievements and his personality.  Alex was the dominant bird in the lab (some other birds were introduced throughout the years), and used to test new student assistants by asking for every noun he knew.  If they got everything, they were in.

I already knew that Alex could count, that he knew the words for shapes and colors, that he combined words to make a new word, “banerry”, which to him, meant apple, out of banana and cherry.  But I learned so much more.  Some things that he did:

• Understood the concept of “none” as a number–basically he understood zero, something that humans have only really understood for a few hundred years.  However, Pepperberg says, “His concept of zero was not as sophisticated as in humans.  He didn’t have ‘none’ as the beginning of a number string, going up to six.”
• He could identify numbers in Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.).
• He used “I love you” and “I’m sorry” in the correct context.  Of course, this is likely because something like “I’m sorry” will diffuse the situation when someone is angry, not necessarily because he felt remorse.
• At the time of his death, they were starting on abstractions, to see if he saw the world in the same way that we do.

When Alex and Dr. Pepperberg started out in the 1970’s, according to common thought in the scientific community, Alex shouldn’t have even been able to label objects.

Who knows where they would have gone, what Alex would have said, had he not died so suddenly.

Yo FTC: I received this book as part of a blog tour by TLC.  For more info on the tour, check out the Alex & Me page on their website.

 
Buy Alex & Me on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
The First Word by Christine Keneally
The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved by Robbins Burling
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven J Pinker
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven J Pinker
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco
Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess
Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird by Bruce Thomas Boehrer
Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin
Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays by Candace Savage
Of Parrots and People by Mira Tweti
Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights by Steven M Wise
In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall
My Life with the Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Steven Jay Gould
Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence by George Page

Other works by Dr. Irene Pepperberg:

The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots