Talking birds do not dissect the sounds of their imitations into discrete units. Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and good-bye. One property of all human languages (which will be discussed fur- their in chapter 6) is the discreteness of the speech or gestural units, which are ordered and reordered, combined and split apart. Generally, a parrot says what it is taught, or what it hears, and no more. If Polly learns “Polly wants a cracker” and “Polly wants a doughnut” and also learns to imitate the single words whiskey and bagel, she will not spontaneously produce, as children do, “Polly wants whiskey” or “Polly wants a bagel” or “Polly wants whiskey and a bagel.” If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs, and then learns the word parrot, she will not be able to form the plural parrots as children do by the age of three; nor can a parrot form an unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units, or understand utterances never heard before. Reports of an African gray parrot named Alex suggest that new methods of training animals may result in more learning than was previously believed possible. When the trainer uses words in context, Alex seems to relate some sounds with their meanings. This is more than simple imitation, but it is not how children acquire the complexities of the grammar of any language. It is more like a dog learning to associate certain sounds with meanings, such as heel, sit, fetch, and so on. Indeed, a recent study in Germany reports on a nine-year-old border collie named Rico who has acquired a 200-word vocabulary (containing both German and English words). Rico did not require intensive training but was able to learn many of these words quite quickly.