Lonely Asian Elephant Learns To Speak 5 Words In Korean

Friday, November 2, 2012 - 16:00 in Biology & Nature

Asian Elephant Wikimedia CommonsUniversity of Vienna researchers analyze how and why a young elephant learned to imitate human speech. If you speak any Korean--or are familiar with Season 2 of Arrested Development--you know that the word for "hello" is "annyong." Koshik, an elephant who spent much of his youth at Everland Zoo in South Korea, can actually pronounce it. A beluga whale made the news just last week for being able to imitate human sounds, but this elephant can actually say words! The animal kingdom is constantly one-upping itself. Even our closest primate relatives cannot repeat our speech patterns despite being shown to understand language because their larynxes aren't shaped to function the way ours do. Of course, parrots don't even have lips and yet they can imitate human speech with amazing accuracy. Research from the University of Vienna says that parrots have the neuronal capacity to perceive, decode and...

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