The Quiet Hour With Tnkerbell.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 260, 2 November 1935, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Quiet Hour With Tnkerbell.

Timothy had a pet given him somej time ago, a rather strange pet for a little boy to have —it was a green parrot that said "Hello" and "Pretty cocky." The children called it Poll and quite soon the bird was repeating "Poll" in answer to its name. They found it was quite easy to teach Poll to talk. By just saying the word very distinctly and slowly every time they passed the cage the bird learnt to imitate their words and was soon calling "roll" after them. The words a parrot says arc really an echo. It is believed that no parrot really knows in the least what it is talking about and that when its remarks or answers seem apt it is merely a coincidence. The parrot has keen ears and a clever brain, so that it hears very distinctly words littered in its presence and can reproduce with its throat and tongue

and beak many of the sounds it go cleverly hears. This is certainly a different tiling from an echo, but so far as attaching any meaning to the sounds is concerned parrot speech is only echo speech. Little children who are just learning to speak reproduce words they do not understand in much the same way. We find that all words are just the same to the parrot. It will repeat a word like "Algebra" if it hears it often enough just° as readily as. it will say "Pretty Poll." It is just a "living echo," and the process which goes on in the parrot's brain is no more than that which goes on in our own brain when wc imitate or repeat the sounds of words spoken to us in some language of which we know nothing. But "whether your pet is a puss or a do? or perhaps a parrot, which you are teaching to talk, the main thing to remember is that these .little friends arc like human beings in that they must be treated with a good deal of patience and sympathetic kindness.