Humpbacks songs have patterns that make human language

Humpbacks songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are not similar to the public, similar to those seen in human language. While this does not mean that the songs that convey complex meanings that our sentences do, it suggests that Yeles can teach their songs in a similar way as how human infant should understand language.

Only male humpback whales (Megaptera NovaEangliae) Sing, and the behavior is believed to be important to attract mattes. Songs are constantly evolving, with new elements that appear and spread through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one.

“We think it’s a bit like a standardized test where everyone has to do the same task, but you can make changes and uptime to show that you are better at the task than everyone else,” says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.

Instead of trying to find meaning in the songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that can match those seen in human language. They analyzed eight years of whale songs recorded around New Caledonia in the Pacific.

The researchers started by creating alphanumeric codes to take each song from each recording, included about 150 unique sounds in total. “Basically, it’s another grouping of sounds, so a year they might grunt grunt squeak, and that’s why we get AaB, and then another year they can have moaning that squeaks grunting and it would be CBA,” says Allen.

Once all the songs were coded, a team of lingers had to find out how to best analyze so much data. The breakthrough came when the researchers decided to use an analysis technique that used how infants discover words called transitional probability.

“The speech is continuous and there are no breaks between words, so infants have to discover words bondaries,” says Inbal Arnon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “To do this, the statistical information about low easy information uses: It is more likely that sounds occur together if they are part of the same word. Infants use these dips in the likelihood of one sound following another to detect word bonds.

In the expression, “Beautiful Flowers”, for example, recognizes that the syllables “before” and “tty” are more likely to go together than “tty” and “flow”. “If the whale song has a similar statistical structure, these signals should also be used to segment it,” says Arnon.

Using the alphanumeric versions of the whale songs, the team calculated the probabilities of the transition between sound elements, making a cut when the next lifelong was surprising considering the previous one.

“These cuts divide the song into segmented sub-sequences,” says Arnon. “We then look at their distribution and found, astonishing that they follow the same distribution that exists across all human languages.”

In this pattern, called a zipfish distribution, the occurrence of less common words decreases in a predictable way. The second striking discovery is that the most common wall sounds tend to be short, just as the most common human words are – a rule known ZIPF’s abbreviation law.

Nick Enfield at the University of Sydney, who was involved in the study, says it’s a new way of analyzing whale singing. “What it means is that if you analyze War and PeaceThe most frequent word will be twice as frequent as the next and so on – and the researchers have identified a similar pattern in whale songs, ”he says.

Team member Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says he did not think the method would work. “I will never forget the moment when the graph appears is similar to the one we know so well from human language,” he says. “This made us realize that we are uncovered a deep communaly between these two species, separated by tens of thousands of millions of years of development.”

However, the researchers emphasize that this statistical pattern does not lead to the conclusion that whale song is a language that conveys meaning as we would understand. They suggest that the possible reason for the generalness is that booth -whale song and human language are taught culturally.

“The physical distribution of words or sounds in language is a truly fascinating feature, but there are a million other things over languages ​​that are just very different from whale,” says Enfield.

In a separate study published this week, Mason Youngblood at Stony Brook University in New York found that marine marine mammals can also have structural similarities to human language in their communication.

Menzerath’s law, which predicts that phrases with multiple words should be composed of shorter words, were present in 11 out of 16 cetacean species that were examined. ZIPF’s abbreviation law was found in two out of five species where the available data made it possible to register.

“Together, our studies suggest that the humpback whale song has evolved to be more effective and easier to learn, and that these features can be on par with notes in phrases and phrases in songs,” says Youngblood.

“Importly is the development of these songs both biologically and cultural. Some features, such as Menzerath’s law, may emerge through the biological development of vocal apparatus, while other features, such as ZIPF’s ranking legislation [the Zipfian distribution]May require cultural transmission of songs between individuals, ”he says.