For all the linguistic diversity of the world, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These work even deeper than grammar and syntax; They are rooted in statistical laws that predict how often we use certain words and how long those words tend to be. Think about them as built -in railings to maintain the easy language to learn and use.
And now scientists have found some of the same patterns in whale vocalizations. Two new studies published this week show that, despite the extensive evolutionary distance between us, humans and whales have converged in solutions similar to the problem of communicating through sound. “Strengthens the opinion that we should think of human language not as a completely different phenomenon from other communication systems, but to think about what it shares with them,” says Inbal Arnon, professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co -author of one of the studies.
Arnon and his colleagues, whose article was published on Thursday in Science, He analyzed eight years of recordings of humpback whales of Nueva Caledonia in the South Pacific, and discovered that they closely attached to a principle called ZIPF frequency law. This mathematical power law, a distinctive seal of human language, is observed in the frequencies of words use: the most common word in any language appears twice as much as the second most common, three times more often than the most common third, And so. in.
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Listen to the hump whale songs:
But before they could analyze the recordings, the researchers had to identify the segments that were analogous to words (although, more importantly, without semantic meaning) in a current of grunts, squeaky and groans of another world. They found themselves in the same situation as a newborn baby, so naturally, that is where they went to guidance. Human babies “get this continuous acoustic signal,” says Arnon, “and have to find out where the words are.”
A baby’s strategy is simple: listen to unexpected combinations of adult speech sounds. Whenever one identifies one, you have probably located a limit between words because these rare transitions are less likely to occur inside words.
Incredibly, humps can be using the same approach. When the researchers segmented whale songs based on these “TRANSITION PROBABILITIES” – Right as a human baby would Transition were not a product of a random possibility We would do it?
Why would the same communicative behaviors evolve independently in whales and humans, whose last common ancestor was a creature of Musaraña who lived approximately 100 million years ago? Well, the distribution of words according to Zipf’s frequency law, or Zipfian distribution, seems Help babies understand language. “When things organize that way in their contribution, he will learn better,” says Simon Kirby, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh and co -author of the new Science paper.
In other words, the structure of language is largely a product of how it goes from one generation to the next. Then, the team reasoned that Zipf’s frequency law could appear not only in humans, but also anywhere else that sequential vocal signs are learned culturally (transmitted from one individual to another). That group includes what Kirby calls “a cluster of strange species”, including singing birds, bats, non -human primates, elephants, seals, dolphins and whales. It is believed that almost all other animals that communicate vocally, from dogs to frogs and fish, do so through signals that are genetically programmed, are not learned.
Now we know that whales, at least, share a key ingredient of our own communication system, a finding that fits the growing attitude between scientists that we are not as unique as we once think. Rather, our linguistic capacity is based on a heterogeneous mixture of physical and cognitive features, many of them extend throughout the animal kingdom.
In a separate article published in Scientific advances On Wednesday, Mason Youngblood, a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University, found evidence of two more features in whale vocalizations: One was the law of brevity, which, when applied to human language, affirms that the more common a word is, the shorter tends to be, and vice versa. The other was Menzerath’s law, which says that the longer a linguistic construction (as a sentence), the shorter its constituent parts (such as the clauses of a sentence).
Both patterns were especially strong in the humpback song, and both appeared in several other species as well. These laws have to do with efficiency. They describe how animals “maximize the amount of information they transmit in the least amount of time and with the least amount of energy,” says Youngblood.
By tempting that can be comparisons with human language, researchers warn of reading too much in these parallels. “The whale song is not a language,” says Garland flatly, and points out that most experts agree that the “words” of animals have no semantic meaning. (Nor the music, in the case, the frequency law of Py Zipf also appears there).
However, in terms of similarities, they are surprising. Luke Rendell, a biologist at St. Andrews University, who did not participate in any of the studies, believes that these findings could be “telling us something deep about how evolution can converge or, perhaps, be limited to certain types of learning. ” That is, they could be informing us about the range of possibilities for complex communication in any species.
Similarly, Kirby suggests that the Zipf frequency law (and perhaps other linguistic laws) could be “a kind of digital footprint of these culturally evolved systems”, present wherever animals have crossed the threshold of cultural learning. “It is probably a very fundamental characteristic of the organization of cognitive systems,” he adds.
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