An Elephant That Speaks Korean

I know Birds producing human speech, but i  have never heard an animal that can imitate  human speech.

Have you ever imagined of an elephant that can speak?  but it is true. I wondered when i read this news. I'm sure you'll also be amazed after you read this.

Koshik has proved it.    Koshik is  an Asian  elephant who can imitate exactly five  korean words that can be easily understood by those who know the language. These include "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down"), and "choah" ("good").

The researchers have released a report  on Nov 1 in 'current Biology', a cell press publication about  Koshik..

"Human speech basically has two important aspects, pitch and timbre," says Angela Stoeger of the University of Vienna. Interestingly, the elephant Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timbre patterns: he accurately imitates human formants as well as the voice pitch of his trainers. The elephant executes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his trunk in his mouth. This is remarkable considering the huge size, the long vocal tract, and other anatomical differences between an elephant and a human.

According to Stoeger, elephants have a trunk instead of lips. While their large larynx can produce very low-pitched sounds, Koshik's speech mimicry exactly copies the pitch and other characteristics of his human trainers' voices. A structural analysis of Koshik's speech showed not just clear similarities to human voices, but also clear differences from the usual calls of elephants.

There have been some earlier reports of vocal mimicry in both African and Asian elephants. African elephants have been known to imitate the sound of truck engines, and a male Asian elephant living in a zoo in Kazakhstan was said to produce utterances in both Russian and Kazakh, but that case was never scientifically investigated.

In the case of Koshik, Angela Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Tecumseh Fitch, and their colleagues confirmed that Koshik was imitating Korean words in several ways. First, they asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard when listening to playbacks of the elephant's sounds.

"We found a high agreement concerning the overall meaning, and even the Korean spelling of Koshik's imitations," Stoeger says. But as far as the scientists can tell, Koshik doesn't actually mean what he says.

It's not completely clear why Koshik adopted his unusual vocal behavior, but the researchers suggest that it might go back to his days as a juvenile. Koshik was the only elephant living at the Everland Zoo in South Korea for about five years. During an important period for elephant bonding and development, humans were his only social contacts.

"We suggest that Koshik started to adapt his vocalizations to his human companions to strengthen social affiliation, something that is also seen in other vocal-learning species—and in very special cases, also across species," Stoeger says.

Source: EurekAlert
You can hear an audio recording of Koshik here: http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/49235.php?from=224898