ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Human language follows statistical regularities or linguistic laws. For instance, Zipf's law of brevity states that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter it tends to be. All human languages adhere to this word structure. However, it is unclear whether Zipf's law emerged de novo in humans or whether it also exists in the non-linguistic vocal systems of our primate ancestors. Using a vocal conditioning paradigm, we examined the capacity of marmoset monkeys to efficiently encode vocalizations. We observed that marmosets adopted vocal compression strategies at three levels: (i) increasing call rate, (ii) decreasing call duration and (iii) increasing the proportion of short calls. Our results demonstrate that marmosets, when able to freely choose what to vocalize, exhibit vocal statistical regularities consistent with Zipf's law of brevity that go beyond their context-specific natural vocal behaviour. This suggests that linguistic laws emerged in non-linguistic vocal systems in the primate lineage.
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