ArticleScience advances2025
Language-like efficiency in whale communication.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Language-like properties in the vocal behavior of animals.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- An information-theoretic optimal power law.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Article
- Zebra finches transform manipulated songs with shuffled syllables to exhibit linguistic laws.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Leopard seal song patterns have similar predictability to nursery rhymes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath's Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
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Abstract
Vocal communication systems in humans and other animals experience selection for efficiency-optimizing the benefits they convey relative to the costs of producing them. Two hallmarks of efficiency, Menzerath's law and Zipf's law of abbreviation, predict that longer sequences will consist of shorter elements and more frequent elements will be shorter, respectively. Here, we assessed the evidence for both laws in cetaceans by analyzing vocal sequences from 16 baleen and toothed whale species and comparing them to 51 human languages. Eleven whale species exhibit Menzerath's law, sometimes with greater effect sizes than human speech. Two of the five whale species with categorized element types exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation. On average, whales also tend to shorten elements and intervals toward the end of sequences, although this varies by species. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the vocalizations of many cetacean species have undergone compression for increased efficiency in time.
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