Question: Are birds that mimick human language e.g. parrotts etc. capable of understanding the language? Or are they simply associating a phrase with an action, similar to eccelelia in some autistic children?

Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

Carolyn is probably better to answer this one since she is specifically a speech person but I’ll give it a try…

Parrots and birds that mimic speech don’t understand it, they simply repeat the sounds as best they can. So they aren’t even associating a phrase or word with an action — they are simply (and mindlessly) repeating a sound they hear. It’s pretty impressive that they can do this at all but it is almost totally unrelated to human language.