talking parrots

“One developmental milestone is when infants begin to relate adult sound patterns to specific meanings,” wrote Berg’s team, who described their findings July 13 Proceedings of The Royal Society B. “Among these sounds, an individual’s own name is one of the earliest adult words for which infants show evidence of acoustic pattern recognition. Our study suggests that at least a moderately convergent process may occur in parrots.”

Whales might not be the only wild animals to have individualized names.  Wired reports.