Communication system of African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus)

Abstract

Parrots are well known for their imitative abilities of human speech. Since a few years, some research studies have highlighted complex cognitive skills of some parrot species, especially of African grey parrots. However, to date, complete studies on the vocal abilities of these birds are missing. We thus carried out different experiments to evaluate the specificity of their communication system. After a description of their vocal repertoire, we investigated whether some vocalizations are mainly produced in some situations. We also described a bioacoustic analysis method aiming to automatically extract acoustic features specific to a classification issue