ArticleFrontiers in zoology2017
Trade-offs in the production of animal vocal sequences: insights from the structure of wild chimpanzee pant hoots.
Article in Frontiers in zoology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Isochrony in titi monkeys duets: social context as a proximate cause of duets' rhythm and regularity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 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
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Auditory thresholds compatible with optimal speech reception likely evolved before the human-chimpanzee split.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- 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
- Article
- 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
- Linguistic laws of brevity: conformity in Indri indri.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Rutting vocal display in male impala (Aepyceros melampus) and overlap with alarm context.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- Article
- Adherence to Menzerath's Law is the exception (not the rule) in three duetting primate species.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- An exploration of Menzerath's law in wild mountain gorilla vocal sequences.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Brevity is not a universal in animal communication: evidence for compression depends on the unit of analysis in small ape vocalizations.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Do penguins' vocal sequences conform to linguistic laws?Biology letters · 2020Article
- Linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Female indris determine the rhythmic structure of the song and sustain a higher cost when the chorus size increases.Current zoology · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundVocal sequences - utterances consisting of calls produced in close succession - are common phenomena in animal communication. While many studies have explored the adaptive benefits of producing such sequences, very little is known about how the costs and constraints involved in their production affect their form. Here, we investigated this issue in the chimpanzee (
resultsWe found that in each of these phases, and for the sequence as a whole, there was a negative relationship between the number of calls produced and their average duration. There was also a negative relationship between the total duration of some adjacent phases. Significant relationships between the fundamental frequency of calls and their number or duration were found for some phases of the sequence, but the direction of these relationships differed between particular phases.
conclusionsThese results indicate that there are trade-offs in terms of signal duration at two levels in pant-hoot production: between call number and duration, and between the relative durations of successive phases. These trade-offs are likely to reflect biomechanical constraints on vocal sequence production. Phase-specific trade-offs also appear to occur between fundamental frequency and call number or duration, potentially reflecting that different phases of the sequence are associated with distinct types of information, linked in different ways to call pitch. Overall, this study highlights the important role of costs and constraints in shaping the temporal and acoustic structure of animal vocal sequences.
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