Talking Animal - On Imitation and Understanding

On Imitation and Understanding

The term refers to animals which can imitate (though not necessarily understand) human speech. Parrots, for example, repeat things nonsensically through exposure. It is an anthropomorphism to call this human speech, as it has no semantic grounding.

Clever Hans was a horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. The horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem, and was unaware that he was providing such cues.