ArticleEvolution letters2019
The "Law of Brevity" in animal communication: Sex-specific signaling optimization is determined by call amplitude rather than duration.
Article in Evolution letters, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Network analysis reveals context-dependent structural complexity of social calls in serrate-legged small treefrogs.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Modelling the emergence of synchrony from decentralized rhythmic interactions in animal 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
- Linguistic laws in biology.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Linguistic laws of brevity: conformity in Indri indri.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Adherence to Menzerath's Law is the exception (not the rule) in three duetting primate species.Royal Society open science · 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
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The efficiency of informational transfer is one of the key aspects of any communication system. The informational coding economy of human languages is often demonstrated by their almost universal fit to Zipf's "Law of Brevity," expressing negative relationship between word length and its usage frequency. Animal vocal systems, however, provided mixed results in their adherence to this relationship, potentially due to conflicting evolutionary pressures related to differences in signaling range and communicational needs. To examine this potential parallel between human and animal vocal communication, and also to explore how divergent, sex-specific, communicational settings affect signaling efficiency within a species, we examined the complete vocal repertoire of rock hyraxes (
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