Interesting point about the parrot. I had a friend a while back that had an African Gray. Ash had a vocabularly of 500+ words...simply a phenominal bird. And Grays are also one of the smartest birds in the world. They are intelligent and capable of thought processes. There is a famous one named Einstein that has a vocabulary of well over a thousand words...I've seen a couple videos of it. You can probably YouTube her.
But I'll give you a couple of examples of Ash's ability to communicate.
Ash had free run of the house, wings were not clipped, and my friend had a regular habit of taking him for walks around the neighborhood when Ash riding on his shoulder. Because of their closeness, Ash had developed quite the personality. He would terrorize the cats (they had 4...2 inside and 2 outside) and he was flat out a smart-*****.
His sudden response one day to one of Dallas' wife's friends...a large lady that had the habit of doing a sing-song "pretty bird" routine whenever she came over was..."f*** you, lady, I'm a chicken!" Sure, Dallas had taught him that, but full sentences were common with this bird. I thought I was going to die that day when I head that one.
I remember playing cards in the dining room one night and Ash was making a ruckus in the other room, hollering at one of the cats. Dallas yelled out to Ash that if he didn't shut up, he was going to turn him into chicken soup. Ash came walking (yes, he walked all over the house) into the room, clucking like a chicken. Dallas never taught him that, but thinks his wife did.
Ash would hide behind doors to scare cats when they walked by, he tormented the outside cats when they came up to the door, he did absolutely everything that one would think required intelligent thought to come up with.
The point is, God didn't make "dumb" animals. And while it was man that taught Ash to speak, it was Ash's intelligence that enabled him to communicate with man's speech.