ArticleBiology letters2020
Do penguins' vocal sequences conform to linguistic laws?
Article in Biology letters, 2020. 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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26 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong.Science advances · 2026Article
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- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Accelerando and crescendo in African penguin ecstatic display songs.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Nonlinear vocal phenomena in African penguin begging calls: occurrence, significance and potential applications.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- An evolutionary model of rhythmic accelerando in animal vocal signalling.PLoS computational biology · 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
- Article
- 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
- Vocal tract shape variation contributes to individual vocal identity in African penguins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Penguins perceive variations of source- and filter-related vocal parameters of species-specific vocalisations.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Effect of Environmental Variables on African Penguin Vocal Activity: Implications for Acoustic Censusing.Biology · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Benford's Law applies to word frequency rank in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.PloS one · 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
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Information compression is a general principle of human language: the most frequent words are shorter in length (Zipf's Law of Brevity) and the duration of constituents decreases as the size of the linguistic construct increases (Menzerath-Altmann Law). Vocal sequences of non-human primates have been shown to conform to both these laws, suggesting information compression might be a more general principle. Here, we investigated whether display songs of the African penguin, which mediate recognition, intersexual mate choice and territorial defence, conform with these laws. Display songs are long, loud sequences combining three types of syllables. We found that the shortest type of syllable was the most frequent (with the shortest syllable being repeated stereotypically, potentially favouring signal redundancy in crowded environments). We also found that the average duration of the song's constituents was negatively correlated with the size of the song (a consequence of increasing the relative number of the shortest syllable type, rather than reducing the duration across all syllable types, thus preserving the communication of size-related information in the duration of the longest syllable type). Our results provide the first evidence for conformity to Zipf's and Menzerath-Altmann Laws in the vocal sequences of a non-primate species, indicating that these laws can coexist with selection pressures specific to the species' ecology.
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