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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (594716)	7/24/2004 5:49:36 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 769670

Maybe not today, but soon there is hope for the sad disposition the liberal parrots now suffer. Cognition & Communication Communicative competence requires learning both how to produce and use a communication code. Subjects taught a nonspecies-specific code -- an exceptional repertoire for which they have no predispositions -- can undergo experimental manipulations to determine the conditions for learning the code and the extent of functional use that is acquired. Training procedures that rely on referential social modeling and differ significantly from common ethological and psychological paradigms have enabled a parrot to acquire and combine English vocalizations (an exceptional code) to: (1) request, refuse, quantify, identify, and categorize objects, and (2) control, to a limited extent, its immediate environment (e.g., Pepperberg 1981, 1990a, 1990b, 1992b). Earlier attempts to train functional communication in parrots, using standard techniques (Mowrer 1952), were unsuccessful. Our lab continues to: (1) study acquisition of a human code by additional parrots, and examine the effects on learning of species identity of the social model; (2) examine the level of acquired competence -- the extent to which this code can be used for comprehending questions, numerical concepts, object-object relations, equivalence relations, prepositions, displacement, use of verbs, recognizing 2-dimensional forms, negation, and how labeling might affect object recall and form perception; and (3) examine how social modeling may offer insights into other studies of vocal learning, particularly with respect to passerine song. alexfoundation.org