ArticleBiology letters2020
An exploration of Menzerath's law in wild mountain gorilla vocal sequences.
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 12 papers.
What it found
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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
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- 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
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Linguistic laws in biology.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Menzerath's law, traditionally framed as a negative relationship between the size of a structure and its constituent parts (e.g. sentences with more clauses have shorter clauses), is widespread across information-coding systems ranging from human language and the vocal and gestural sequences of primates and birds, to the building blocks of DNA, genes and proteins. Here, we analysed an extensive dataset of 'close-call' sequences produced by wild mountain gorillas (
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