Angela Stoeger-Horwath and a colleague record Koshik’s sounds. Photo credit: Stoeger et al, Current Biology

Nov 1: A 22-year old South Asian male elephant in a zoo in South Korea has acquired the ability to imitate human speech, an international team of scientists reported today after analysing its repertoire of sounds.

The captive-born elephant, named Koshik, can reproduce certain components of human speech with such fidelity that native speakers of Korean can understand and transcribe the sounds into words, the scientists said.

Biologist Angela Stoeger-Horwath at the University of Vienna, Austria, and her colleagues said they have confirmed the elephant’s trainers' claims that Koshik can produce sounds that seem like imitations of five Korean words: annyong (hello), anja (sit down), aniya (no), nuo (lie down), and choah (good). Their study of the elephant's sounds appeared today in the journal Current Biology.

“This is the first confirmed case of speech imitation in an elephant,” Stoeger-Horwath told The Telegraph. There are anecdotal accounts of an elephant in Kazakhstan that produced speech-like utterances that resembled Russian and Kazakh speech but, she said, they were not investigated by scientists.

Scientists say that while parrots and mynahs can efficiently imitate human speech, the imitation of human speech by mammals is extremely rare. Only a beluga whale and a harbour seal have been documented in history as imitating human speech.

“Human speech is particularly difficult to imitate because of the physical complexity of producing human sounds,” said Shermin de Silva, director of the Uda Walawe Elephant Research Project in Sri Lanka, a research team member.

“Koshik’s ability to control his vocal tract and trunk lets him produce very human-like utterances with a completely different set of tools, demonstrating fairly complex physical and cognitive abilities,” de Silva told The Telegraph.

The scientists have observed that Koshik places the tip of his trunk inside his mouth to modulate the shape of the vocal tract to produce” very accurate” imitations of frequency components of human speech.

Koshik was captive-born in 1990 to Taesan and Taesoon, elephants from Thailand brought to Seoul in the 1970s. He was moved to the Samsung Everland Zoo in South Korea’s Gyeonggi-do province in 1993 where he lived with two female elephants until he was five-years-old. But for seven years, from 1995 to 2002, the scientists said, Koshik was the only elephant in the zoo, a period during which he was extensively exposed to human speech and trained to obey commands.

“Koshik's exposure (during this period) almost exclusively to humans probably had a lot of influence on his predisposition to learn,” de Silva said. The earlier documented cases of the whale and seal had also learnt human speech in similar circumstances.

His trainers first noticed Koshik imitating speech in 2004, Stoeger-Horwarth and her colleagues said in their research paper, but it is unclear whether he began to imitate speech when he was 14-years- old or his earlier imitations remained unrecognised.

The scientists said “the determining factor” that might explain Koshik’s ability may have been the deprivation of the company of other elephants “during an important period of bonding and development when humans were his only social contact”.

But the scientists point out that the imitation isn’t perfect. “The agreement was high for vowels and relatively poor for consonants,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, the word choah was often transcribed by human listeners as boah (collect), or moa (look), although Koshik was not trained on either of these words.

Vocal learning, the ability to imitate sounds, is unusual, but not unique to humans, said Stoeger-Horwath. Birds, aquatic mammals, bats, and elephants are capable of imitating complex sounds but apes lack this ability. “Studying animals like birds, seals, or elephants,” she said, “might help us learn more about how and why vocal learning developed in our own species.”