ArticleNature communications2024
Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Language-like properties in the vocal behavior of animals.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- TweetyBERT: Automated parsing of birdsong through self-supervised machine learning.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Call combination order and iterations may shift meaning in sooty mangabey vocal sequences.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Leopard seal song patterns have similar predictability to nursery rhymes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Automatic detection and annotation of eastern Caribbean sperm whale codas.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Article
- A bounded hierarchy framework for the evolution of syntax.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- AI decodes the calls of the wild.Nature · 2024Article
- Variation and convergence in the morpho-functional properties of the mammalian neocortex.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. While a subset of codas have been shown to encode information about caller identity, almost everything else about the sperm whale communication system, including its structure and information-carrying capacity, remains unknown. We show that codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure. First, we report previously undescribed features of codas that are sensitive to the conversational context in which they occur, and systematically controlled and imitated across whales. We call these rubato and ornamentation. Second, we show that codas form a combinatorial coding system in which rubato and ornamentation combine with two context-independent features we call rhythm and tempo to produce a large inventory of distinguishable codas. Sperm whale vocalisations are more expressive and structured than previously believed, and built from a repertoire comprising nearly an order of magnitude more distinguishable codas. These results show context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalisation can appear in organisms with divergent evolutionary lineage and vocal apparatus.
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