Dear Lucy Linguistics

Dear Lucy Linguistics,

    I have read your letter, and I am pleased with your decision about looking into “Alex & Me”. I am an animal lover, and found this book quite interesting. For starters, “Alex & Me”, is a book about human-animal communications. It is a book about a bird, Alex, who learns human language through his trainer Irene Pepperberg, whom is also the author of this book.
    “Alex & Me”, starts off by giving Pepperbergs background information, and how she eventually came to own Alex. Pepperberg was a child whose parents were distant and didn’t show her much affection. On her fourth birthday her father gave her a parakeet, who became her companion. Along the years Pepperberg owned different birds, and considered herself a “bird person”. although chemistry was her first choice in career studies, Pepperberg found she had a new passion for researching about non human animals being able to learning human language.
    In this book Pepperberg talks about her struggles as a researcher; about how others would not take her seriously. This occurred in many different was. Some disregarded her work simply because they didn’t believe a non-primate animal would be able to accomplish learning human language. Others didn’t take her seriously because she had no published papers in the field of biology. However, Pepperberg was not discouraged, and continued training Alex.
    Alex was introduced to language by learning labels. For example he learned to pronounce and identify the labels “Key” and “paper”. he was able to identify what was a key and what was considered paper. After a year of training, Alex was actually able to label seven different objects, which was quite remarkable. “This kind of vocal cognitive ability had never before been demonstrated in nonhuman animals, not even chimpanzees” (Pepperberg66). The book takes you on a journey of Alex’s training, which is moving. The thought that no one believed Pepperberg could make such an accomplishment is astonishing.
    I enjoyed this book in so many different levels. The language that Alex was able to learn is very interesting, especially because the book takes you step by step through his training. My favorite part of the book was when Alex was able to pronounce and understand how to use the words “I love you”. Alex was able to show emotion in a language that we are able to understand. Because I have pets of my own, if my dog was able to tell me that he loved me, I would be ecstatic, but they cant exactly speak to us, so we only assume they love us because of  how we read their body language.
    The fact that Alex was able to learn human language, lets us know that we still have a lot to learn about language. Although the book is about a bird learning human language, it is relevant to the class. The book includes linguistic terms that could  be applied to the class. Its easier to understand these terms by reading them in a novel than by reading them in a text book, in a sense its more fun! I don’t want to spoil the book for you, so I think I’ll stop here. I hope this letter was persuasive enough to get you to read “Alex &Me”, I really enjoyed this book, and I hope that you do too.
Sincerely,
Denise Perez