Waalong standards followed a universal language law, found in new research

All known human languages ​​show a stunning pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as often as the second most common, three times in the third, and so on. It is known as Zipf’s law.

Researchers seek evidence of this communication standard among other species, but so far no other examples found.

on New research Today in Science, our team of experts in Whale Song, Linguistics and Psychology analysis from song recordings from Humpback Whales in New Caledonia. Inban Arnon from the Hebrew University, Ellen Garland from the University of St Andravs, and Simon Kirby inspired children in Edinburgh, analyzed technology in analysis of a song song.

We discovered that the same ZIPFIAN standard in the whole world found in the whole languages ​​are also done on the song song. This complex signal system, like the language of the person, has learned each person from others.

Learn like an infant

If the infant people are learning, they need to know where words start and end. Speaking continues and does not come with the bonds between the words they can use. So how can they separate the language?

Thirty years of research It is revealed that they do this by listening to the context-shocked sounds: the sounds within words are somewhat thoughtful, but between words that cannot be each. We check the Whale Song data using the same method.

Unexpectedly, using this method revealed by the Song Song in whale similar statistics assets found in all languages. It does the human language and the whale song with about statistically parts.

In other words, both of them have recurrent parts in which transitions between elements are more thoughtful inside the part. In addition, this recurrent sub-successor that we saw following the distribution of the Zipfian frequency found in all human languages, and found no other species.

How are the same statistical assets that arise in two types of different types of each other in many ways? We recommend that we find these similarities because people and whales share a learning mechanism: culture.

A cultural origin

Our findings have grown up an interesting question: Why do different systems such that less distinct have common structures? We suggest the reason behind it is that both learn culture.

Cultural evolution is inevitable to lead to emergence of properties that make learning easier. If a system is hard to know, it does not live with the next generation of students.

there Growth evidence FROM Experiments with people having the features of statistical features, and to follow them with a zipfian distribution, makes learning easier. It suggests that learning and transmission have an important role in how these possessions arise in the human song and the whale song.

So can we talk to the whales now?

Finding a joint structure between Whale Song and man’s language can also lead to another question: Can we talk to whales now? The short answer is not, never.

Our study does not investigate the meaning behind the sequences in the sequentially consecutive consecutive sequences. We don’t know what these parts can do whales, if they mean anything.

It helps think about it like musical instrument, as well as music also have structures. A melody can learn, repeated, and spread – but that doesn’t give meaning to music notes in the same way with meaning.

Next: birdssong

Our work also makes a bold guess: we need to know this ZIPFIAN distribution wherever complex communication has passed into culture. People and whales are not the only types of things doing this.

We know what is known as “Vocal Production Learning” in an unusual breeds of the whole animal kingdom. Bird songs in particular can give the best place to look like a lot of bird species studying their songs, and not like whales, many we know How to learn the song.

Similarly, we hope not to find these statistical communication statistics on species without sending complex communication by learning. This can help reveal if cultural evolution is the common driver of these properties between people and whales.