ArticleAnimal cognition2021
Linguistic laws of brevity: conformity in Indri indri.
Article in Animal cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dynamics of jaw kinematics and fundamental frequency suggest vocal tract tuning in the indris' song.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- The Ontogeny of Vocal Rhythms in a Non-Human Primate.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Singing out of tune: sexual and developmental differences in the occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in primate songs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 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
- "The song remains the same": not really! Vocal flexibility in the song of the indris.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Singing more, singing harsher: occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in a primate' song.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- There You Are! Automated Detection of Indris' Songs on Features Extracted from Passive Acoustic Recordings.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- 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
- Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vocal and gestural sequences of several primates have been found to conform to two general principles of information compression: the compensation between the duration of a construct and that of its components (Menzerath-Altmann law) and an inverse relationship between signal duration and its occurrence (Zipf's law of abbreviation). Even though Zipf's law of brevity has been proposed as a universal in animal communication, evidence on non-human primate vocal behavior conformity to linguistic laws is still debated, and information on strepsirrhine primates is lacking. We analyzed the vocal behavior of the unique singing lemur species (Indri indri) to assess whether the song of the species shows evidence for compression. As roars have a chaotic structure that impedes the recognition of each individual utterance, and long notes are usually given by males, we focused on the core part of the song (i.e., the descending phrases, composed of two-six units). Our results indicate that indris' songs conform to Zipf's and Menzerath-Altmann linguistic laws. Indeed, shorter phrases are more likely to be included in the song, and units' duration decrease at the increase of the size of the phrases. We also found that, despite a sexual dimorphism in the duration of both units and phrases, these laws characterize sequences of both males and females. Overall, we provide the first evidence for a trade-off between signal duration and occurrence in the vocal behavior of a strepsirrhine species, suggesting that selective pressures for vocal compression are more ancestral than previously assumed within primates.
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