Elephant Koshik Case

Annyeong" (hello), "anja" (sit down), "aniya" (no), "nuwo" (lie down) and "joa" (good) are 5 simple Korean words but if an elephant says, they become much more exciting. In 2006 a YouTube Video was released that featured a talking Elephant. This allured some researchers to find out the scientific reasons behind this amazing talent. In the year 2010, Austrian biologist Angela Stoeger-Horwath and German biophysicist Daniel Mietchen started studying the elephant. The Elephant is called Koshik, a 22-year old Asian elephant who was born in captivity in 1999 and after 3 years he was transferred to Everland Zoo, in South Korea. Dr. Stoegar and her fellow researchers are of the opinion that Koshik had been kept in solitude for a relatively long period of time, especially during the crucial growing period when an elephant, which is an extremely social animal develop its social skills, and since Koshik had no other elephant to socialize and bond with, he started imitating his trainers. The social habits of Asian elephants are somewhat similar to those of African elephants. They live in groups of 5-20 and thus they are extremely social and need to communicate. "Parents or alloparents, provide the primary sensory input and regulation of all essential development processes that interact with greater environmental conditions" (West et al, 2003) and since Koshik's caregivers had taken up the role of his alloparents, their speech and behavior guided the neuro-ethological patterning of Koshik who adapted his speech by putting his trunk tip into his mouth in order to modulate the voice production process and started imitating the sounds that his caretakers would used to communicate with him. Koshik's case is not the first of its kind. A male African elephant in Kazakhstan apparently could speak Russian; however lack of scientific evidence in the case makes Koshik the first living elephant who can imitate human sounds. Physiologically, the process of voice modulation in case of Koshik could not be determined because he is too big for an X-ray and is not well trained to undergo such test procedures. So, there was no way to establish the exact place of sound origination or the process of human-like sound production.

Researchers had to determine that Koshik was actually speaking Korean words than just making a modulated sound which by chance matched Korean words. They recorded Koshik's words and played them back to some Korean natives and asked to write down whatever they heard. The answers excited the researchers because they matched the words that the caretakers had claimed that Koshik could utter. "Vocal learning is defined is defined as the modification of the acoustic structure of the vocalization as a result of experience" (Janik and Slater, 2000). Prior to Koshik, elephants have been known to imitate sounds that they heard through modified vocalization. Mlaika, a 10 year