'Talking' elephant can parrot Korean words

• Koshik, an adult Asian elephant, can imitate five Korean words
• The elephant seemingly can't understand the words, but scientists are impressed
• Vocalizations underlying language may be linked to socialization processes

Dumbo has some company. Meet Koshik, the talking elephant.

The Asian elephant can speak five Korean words, "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down") and "choah" ("good"), researchers reported on Thursday. Koshik lives at the Everland Zoo outside Yongin, South Korea, where he learned to imitate the human words in 2004, according to his trainers.

"Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timbre patterns," in human speech, says researcher Angela Stoeger of Austria's University of Vienna, in a statement on the Current Biology journal study she led. The elephant is just imitating the noises, not actually speaking them, but outside researchers still find the report amazing.

"It is a clear example of elephants' ability to mimic sounds and suggests that the mimicry is driven by a social connection with the trainer," says Cornell's Mya Thompson, an elephant vocalization expert who was not part of the study team. She calls herself "frankly amazed" after watching video of the elephant talking.

In the study, Stoeger and colleagues let 16 native Korean speakers listen to 47 recordings of the elephant's utterances, without telling them who Koshik was. Trainers had claimed the 22-year-old male elephant had this ability, and the results "largely confirmed" the claims, says the study.

Koshik was born in captivity in 1990 and moved to Everland in 1993, living with two female Asian elephants until he was 5 years old. Koshik was the only elephant in Everland from 1995 to 2002. He was trained to obey commands in Korean. People were his only social contacts in those years, and the researchers suspect this led to his remarkable imitative powers.

"There have been other reports of elephants mimicking sounds. As far as I know, this is a first for elephants using their trunk to modify the sound," says elephant researcher Liz Rowland of Cornell, by e-mail.

Besides parrots, captive animals such as Hoover, a harbor seal at the New England Aquarium, have become well known for imitating human voices. (Hoover reportedly said, "Well Hello Deah" in a New England accent.) The Current Biology journal last month reported news of NOC, a beluga whale at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, who imitated human voices, confusing divers, in the 1980s. Only African Grey parrots have consistently demonstrated an understanding of the human speech they imitate.

The researchers suspect that the purpose of imitative vocalizations made by Koshik and other captive animals "might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds across species."