<Tr> <Th> Years active </Th> <Td> 1977--2007 </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Th> Known for </Th> <Td> Intelligent use of language </Td> </Tr> <P> Alex (1976--6 September 2007) was an African grey parrot and the subject of a thirty - year (1977--2007) experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University . When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop . The name Alex was a backronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment . </P> <P> Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other . However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively . Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes . She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five - year - old human, in some respects, and he had not even reached his full potential by the time he died . She believed that the bird possessed the emotional level of a human two - year - old at the time of his death . </P>

Which researcher trained an african grey parrot to answer spoken questions with spoken words