By the end, said Dr Pepperberg, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from. He could answer questions about objects' properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things—and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologise if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators.A human comparison: in Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence, there is a page about how certain human languages (spoken by human races with the lowest IQs, such as bushmen and the Australian aborigines) can only express numbers with the words "one", "two", "few" and "many". In some of these languages, numbers more than 2 can be expressed by chaining multiple "two" and "one" together, e.g. "two two one" = 5. However, this works only up to about seven, at which point the chain of twos gets too complex for the listeners to understand.
These people have average IQs of about 50-60. That makes one wonder about a possible IQ overlap between the most intellectually challenged types of humans and the average Alex-like parrot.
And it also makes one wonder about lots of other things.
Showing 2 out of 2 comments, oldest first:
Comment on Dec 27, 2009 at 14:12 by Leo Lucas
This remind me of a 4-years-old niece of my wife. She couldn't even count to 3, but that was because her parents never taught her to! One day, my wife taught her to count to 10 in less than one hour, with a simple child game.
On the other hand, if you are not a specialized linguist, you'll probably never be able to speak the ǃXóõ language properly, because it's the language with most phonemes, so you would not pass a simple conversation test.
And excuse any mistake. English is not my mother tongue.
Comment on Jan 10, 2010 at 18:19 by denisbider
You need to read (at least one of) his books.