Parrots’ talking ability since long has baffled scientists but an international team of researchers led by Duke University researchers has found that parrot brains are different, which can help to know the bird’s ability to imitate sounds and human speech.

It is said that scientists were aware of the fact that parrot’s brain structure was different since past 34 years, but no one ever linked it to their ability of copy speech.

Mukta Chakraborty, associate professor of neurobiology at Duke and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, said, “This finding opens up a huge avenue of research in parrots, in trying to understand how parrots are processing the information necessary to copy novel sounds and what are the mechanisms that underlie imitation of human speech sounds”.

Researchers believe results of the study might also lend insight into the neural mechanisms of human speech. The new interpretation was reported in the journal PLOS ONE on 24 June.

Researchers after examining the gene expression patterns found that parrot brains are structured differently than the brains of songbirds and hummingbirds, which also exhibit vocal learning.

Parrots also have ‘shells’, or outer rings, which are also involved in vocal learning. The shells are relatively bigger in species of parrots that are well known for their ability to imitate human speech, the group found.

This team also included researchers from Denmark and the Netherlands who donated precious brain tissue for the study.

Furthermore, they characterized the brains of eight parrot species besides the budgerigar, including conures, cockatiels, lovebirds, two species of Amazon parrots, a blue and gold macaw, a kea and an African Grey parrot.

This finding is part of a much larger international effort to sequence the complete genomes of all 10,000 species of birds in next five years, called the Bird 10K Project.