ArticleAnimal cognition2026
Zebra finches transform manipulated songs with shuffled syllables to exhibit linguistic laws.
Article in Animal cognition, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Linguistic laws are increasingly used as markers of efficiency in non-human communication, but it remains unclear how rapidly these patterns can emerge. In this re-analysis of experimental data from James and Sakata (Current Biology 27:3676–3682, 2017), I assessed whether zebra finches tutored with songs with shuffled syllables, where each syllable type is equally common and songs have equal length, transform them to exhibit three linguistic laws associated with efficiency in human language. Menzerath’s law and Zipf’s rank-frequency law are present in the learned songs to a similar extent as in human language, while there is only weak support for Zipf’s law of abbreviation. These results suggest that some measures of language-like efficiency can emerge extremely rapidly, while others may require iterated social learning.
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