in this vid i am standing by poncho's cage but i am ignoring him and looking at some papers, he is trying to get my attention and says my name (cheryl) about 4-5 times. it is a fairly hard name to say even for humans, i think he does a pretty good job. also, he calls my name to get my attention frequently, which leads me to believe that he has some understanding of the meaning. for example; if i am upstairs and he calls "cheryl" and i reply back with "poncho" he replies again with "cheryl". after i say poncho he does not copy me and say poncho also, which is what you would expect from a "parrot".
another thing is that when i first got pocho (i found him in a newspaper ad when i was 13) he had been living with his previous owners donna and robert for 15 years (yes poncho is at least 2 years older than me!), needless to say he was upset/depressed about the change. for the first 2 weeks that i had him the only thing he would say was "donna, robert" "donna, robert" it was heartbreaking to hear. then after about 2-3 weeks it seems he gave up on them and he has never uttered their names again, ever! which is funny because the rest of his vocabulary remained intact. even if i would say their names to him and try to get him to repeat them he would not. however, i do believe that if he saw them again he would remember them, he has an excellent memory for certain people. anyways, my point is that i really think he has some understanding of names and their meaning.
