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Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds
Humpback whale songs follow the same statistical pattern as human languages, known as Zipf's law: the most common element is about twice as frequent as the second, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. Researchers analysed eight years of humpback song recordings from New Caledonia and found this pattern in recurring song segments. They used a method inspired by how infants find word boundaries, listening for sounds that are unexpected between units. The team proposes that cultural learning shapes both systems, because structures that make learning easier survive across generations. The study does not show what the songs mean.
It is the first time this distribution has been found in a non-human communication system, suggesting that the pattern may reflect learning rather than something unique to human language. The work also invites comparisons with birdsong, where song is culturally learned.
background
Zipf's law is an empirical law stating that when a set of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the n-th entry is often approximately inversely proportional to n.
The best-known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency distribution of words in a text or corpus of natural language:
𝗐𝗈𝗋𝖽 𝖿𝗋𝖾𝗊𝗎𝖾𝗇𝖼𝗒 ∝ 1 𝗐𝗈𝗋𝖽 𝗋𝖺𝗇𝗄.
It is usually found that the most common word occurs approximately twice as often as the next common one, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). It is often used in the following form, called the Zipf-Mandelbrot law:
𝖿𝗋𝖾𝗊𝗎𝖾𝗇𝖼𝗒 ∝ 1 ( 𝗋𝖺𝗇𝗄+b )a where a and b are fitted parameters, with a≈1, and b≈2.7.
From Wikipedia: Zipf's law (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗ · text CC BY-SA 4.0
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Illustrative photo · Omegatron, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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