ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Gelada vocal sequences follow Menzerath's linguistic law.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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31 citing papers in PubMed, 102 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Vocal sequence diversity and length remain stable across ontogeny in a catarrhine monkey (Cercocebus atys).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Wild gelada monkeys detect emotional and prosocial cues in vocal exchanges during aggression.PloS one · 2025Article
- Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath's Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Inter-sexual multimodal communication during mating in wild geladas: the leading role of females.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 2022Article
- A mechanism for punctuating equilibria during mammalian vocal development.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Linguistic laws in biology.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- High plasticity in marmoset monkey vocal development from infancy to adulthood.Science advances · 2021Article
- Menzerath-Altmann's Law of Syntax in RNA Accretion History.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Menzerath's Law in the Syntax of Languages Compared with Random Sentences.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Identifying universal principles underpinning diverse natural systems is a key goal of the life sciences. A powerful approach in addressing this goal has been to test whether patterns consistent with linguistic laws are found in nonhuman animals. Menzerath's law is a linguistic law that states that, the larger the construct, the smaller the size of its constituents. Here, to our knowledge, we present the first evidence that Menzerath's law holds in the vocal communication of a nonhuman species. We show that, in vocal sequences of wild male geladas (Theropithecus gelada), construct size (sequence size in number of calls) is negatively correlated with constituent size (duration of calls). Call duration does not vary significantly with position in the sequence, but call sequence composition does change with sequence size and most call types are abbreviated in larger sequences. We also find that intercall intervals follow the same relationship with sequence size as do calls. Finally, we provide formal mathematical support for the idea that Menzerath's law reflects compression-the principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Our findings suggest that a common principle underpins human and gelada vocal communication, highlighting the value of exploring the applicability of linguistic laws in vocal systems outside the realm of language.
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