The discovery of this parrot raises questions about what allows some birds to speak words or phrases, while others are limited to singing and chirping. Timothy Wright, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of New Mexico, says that most, if not all, birds have a linguistic communication system. As for whether parrots understand the phrases they speak, Wright notes that there is scientific evidence that parrots that mimic sounds have abstract thoughts, such as the ability to classify objects by color or size. However, Wright believes that when a parrot repeats a human sentence, for the bird it is just a sequence of sounds, not a meaningful sentence. In 1995, a parrot from California entered the Guinness Book of Records as the bird with the largest human vocabulary, as it was found that the parrot 'Bok' could speak 1728 words before dying at the age of five in late 1994.
