I understand your point about babies learning to talk more or less automatically when exposed to speech... but if a child is NOT exposed to speech during certain developmental phases, they don't ever learn language properly; their brains didn't get wired correctly and the wiring (for that kind of thing) is more or less set after a certain age. My wife has a little guy in her Gr 1 class like that this year, he was left in his crib for three years, only fed and changed, almost no interactions with adults. He is coming along slowly but his difficulties are huge.

Given that, it is amazing that parrots can learn to use language at all, never mind intelligently. It seems to depend on how "communication" and "intelligence" are defined. And it seems from the descriptions of the bird in the article that it is doing a lot more than just mimicking.

Certainly animals can communicate with humans, in a learned manner - my dog can tell me without a doubt when he wants to go out, he just walks over to the door and stands politely, giving me the occasional baleful glance if I don't let him out right away.