Most who acquire language use speech sounds to express meanings, but such sounds are not a necessary aspect of language, as avidenced by the sign language. The use of speech sounds is therefore not a basic part of what we have been calling language. The chirping of birds, the squeaking of dolphins, and the dancing of bees may potentially represent systems similar to human languages. If animal communication systems are not like human language, it will not be due to a lack of speech.
Conversely, when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it doesn't mean they posses language. Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meanings. Talking birds such as parrots and mynah birds are capable of faithfully reproducing words and phrases of human language that they have heard, but their utterances carry no meaning. They are speaking neither English nor their own languages when they sound like us. Talking birds do not dissect the sounds of their initations into discrete units. Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and good bye. One property of all human languages (which will be discussed further in chapter 6) is the discretencess of speech or gestural units, which are ordered and reordered, combined and split apart. Generally, a parrot says what it is taught, or what it hears, and no more. If Polly learns "Polly wants a cracker" and "Polly wants a doughnut" and also learns to imitate the single words whiskey and beg el, she will not spontaneously produce, as children do, "Polly wants whiskey" or "Polly wants whiskey and a begel." If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs , and then learns the words parrot the word parrot, she will be unable to form the plural parrots as children do by the age of three; nor can parrot form an unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units, nor understand utterances nevr heard before. Recent reports of an African gray parrot named Alex studied by Dr. Irene M. Pepperberg suggest that new methods of training animals may result in more learning than was previously believed possible. When the trainer uses words in context , Alex seems to relate some sounds with their meanings. This is more than simple imitation, but it is not how children acquire the complexities of the grammar of any language. It is more like a dog learning to associate certain sounds with meaning, such as heel, sit, fetch, and so on. Alex's ability may go somewhat beyond that. However, the ability to produce sounds similar to those used in human language, even if meanings are related to these sounds, can not be equated with the ability to acquire the complex grammar of a human language.
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