Aimee Morgana had noticed something strange about her parrot.

N’Kisi, a Congo African grey parrot, seemed to be able to comment on the things she was doing. For instance, when she was looking at a particular nude photograph in the Village Voice, the bird called across her Manhattan apartment, “Look at the pretty naked body.” Morgana was suprised; she’d been thinking something similar.

The parrot, which had a large vocabulary—950 words recorded as of 2004—became the subject of a series of tests by Morgana and a Royal Society psychologist called Rupert Sheldrake. They were convinced that N’Kisi was psychic and presented him with photographic prompts to elicit a response. They identified a response 71 times, with 23 responses ruled as as content-relevant. They did not successfully prove that N’Kisi was psychic, but they did assemble a comprehensive table of bird speech.

Talking birds have long been a trope in human stories, but the way they learn to imitate or even interpret our language has been a mystery. They even have a word in English that means to repeat without understanding what is being said—”parroting.” But more research is being conducted on bird speech and sound patterns, illuminating more about human speech along the way.

First off, the way parrots imitate our speech is different than the way we speak in the first place. Birds have a structure called a syrinx that functions as a resonating chamber and lives at the bottom of their trachea, as opposed to the human lanrynx, which is at the top of our throats. Structured like a pan pipe, it does not have the chords that a human voice does but functions by resonating walls. However, it does allow for the lateralization of birds’ songs and allows some birds to produce more than one tone at once.

Birds have historically learned to speak by being socialized, kept as pets and listening in on human conversations. However, it may go beyond that. Some parrots can respond when you ask them how they are doing, so they can make connections between questions and responses from one individual to another as a social interaction. That may indicate that birds have a more complex social learning landscape than previously thought.

We are obsessed with ourselves. Most of what we learn about the world, we relate back to ourselves and what it can tell us about being human. Studying birdsong is no different. A group of studies released in late 2014 compiled a sort of “family tree” of birdsong, identifying genetic key indicators to show patterns in how birdsong develops across species and breeds. The scientists related it back to how humans develop dialects, mimicking sounds to become bilingual and eventually learning to think in another language. Humans can modify speech patterns in a way that not many other species have been observed doing—but maybe birds can, too.

Speech is the major form of communication in human societies as well as bird societies. Perhaps that is what we have in common. Body language constitutes a major part of it, but when our bodies are dissimilar, it is hard to communicate directly. So perhaps mimicking one another can be a way to communicate.

Other animals have picked up on key tones that humans make as a signal for behavior. Dogs answer to whistles after training; cats answer to hisses, and horses answer to tongue-clicks. Those are not sounds those animals naturally make, but they are a gateway into communication between species based on time and experience.

Communication with animals is becoming more and more important as we begin to more accurately understand animal intelligence. Chimpanzees were recently granted human rights in New York City, and there is increasing attention on the intelligence and social behavior of animals such as dolphins and whales. Some researchers are determining ways to communicate with them on their own terms rather than trying to teach them humans speech. It raises ethical questions of whether we have been mistreating animals who are just as intelligent as us.