Can parrots really understand language or are they just mimicking?

The answer

Research by Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex the African grey parrot demonstrated that parrot language abilities go far beyond simple mimicry. Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words and could identify 50 different objects, 7 colors, and 5 shapes. He could answer questions about object properties, understood concepts of 'same' and 'different,' could count up to 6, and grasped the abstract concept of zero, a mathematical milestone that young human children struggle with. He could combine words to create new labels, calling an apple a 'banerry' (banana-cherry) when first encountering one. Other parrots have since demonstrated similar abilities. Neuroscience research has revealed that parrots possess a brain region analogous to the human cerebral cortex that handles complex cognitive tasks despite having evolved independently from mammals for over 300 million years.