ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong.Science advances · 2026Article
- Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 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
- GesturalOrigins: A bottom-up framework for establishing systematic gesture data across ape species.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Animal linguistics: a primer.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Are there disciplinary boundaries in the comparative study of primate cognition?Current research in neurobiology · 2023Review
- Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Flexible signalling strategies by victims mediate post-conflict interactions in bonobos.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 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
- Quantifiers in Natural Language: Efficient Communication and Degrees of Semantic Universals.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Linguistic laws of brevity: conformity in Indri indri.Animal cognition · 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
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies testing linguistic laws outside language have provided important insights into the organization of biological systems. For example, patterns consistent with Zipf's law of abbreviation (which predicts a negative relationship between word length and frequency of use) have been found in the vocal and non-vocal behaviour of a range of animals, and patterns consistent with Menzerath's law (according to which longer sequences are made up of shorter constituents) have been found in primate vocal sequences, and in genes, proteins and genomes. Both laws have been linked to compression-the information theoretic principle of minimizing code length. Here, we present the first test of these laws in animal gestural communication. We initially did not find the negative relationship between gesture duration and frequency of use predicted by Zipf's law of abbreviation, but this relationship was seen in specific subsets of the repertoire. Furthermore, a pattern opposite to that predicted was seen in one subset of gestures-whole body signals. We found a negative correlation between number and mean duration of gestures in sequences, in line with Menzerath's law. These results provide the first evidence that compression underpins animal gestural communication, and highlight an important commonality between primate gesturing and language.
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