Humpback Whale Songs Show Similarities to Human Language Patterns

Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure, but they are very similar to those found in human language. This does not mean that songs convey complex meanings like our sentences, but that whales may learn songs in a similar way to how human infants begin to understand language. It suggests.

Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) When you sing, actions are considered important to attract peers. The songs are constantly evolving, and new elements appear and spread in the population until old songs are replaced with completely new ones.

“I think it's like a standardized test. Everyone has to do the same task, but changing or decorating to show that they're better at tasks than others can be done. You can do it.” Jenny Allen At Griffith University, in the Gold Coast, Australia.

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

The researchers began by creating alphanumeric codes to represent all the songs on every recording, including a total of around 150 unique sounds. “Essentially it's a different sounding group, so maybe a year will make a groaning cry. So we may have an AAB.

Once all the songs were encoded, a team of linguists had to understand how best to analyze so much of the data. The breakthrough occurred when researchers decided to use an analytical technique that applies to methods of discovering words called transition probability.

“The speech is continuous and there is no pause between words, so infants must discover the boundaries of the word.” Invalanon At Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “To do this, use low-level statistics. Specifically, if they are part of the same word, the sounds are more likely to occur together. Infants Use these dips in the possibility of discovering the boundaries of words following another sound.”

For example, the phrase “cute flower” intuitively recognizes that the syllable “pre” and “tty” are more likely to go together than “tty” or “flow.” “If there is a similar statistical structure in a whale song, these cues should also help segment it,” Arnon says.

Using the alphanumeric version of Whale Song, the team calculated the probability of transition between successive sound elements and cut it when the previous sound elements were amazing.

“These cuts divide the song into segmented subsequences,” Arnon says. “We then looked at their distribution and, surprisingly, discovered that they follow the same distribution as seen in all human languages.”

In this pattern called Zipfian distribution, the prevalence of less common words drops in a predictable way. Another impressive finding is that the most common whale sounds tend to be shorter, as is the case with the most common human language.

Nick Enfield At the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the research, it says it is a novel way to analyze whale songs. “What that means is when you analyze it War and peacethe most frequent words are the next twice as often, and researchers have identified similar patterns in whale songs,” he says.

Team Members Simon Carby The University of Edinburgh in the UK says he didn't think this would work. “I will never forget the moment the graph appears. It appears to be familiar from human language,” he says. “This has made me realize that it uncovered a deep commonality between these two species, separated by tens of millions of years of evolution.”

However, researchers emphasize that this statistical pattern does not lead to the conclusion that whale songs are languages ​​that convey meaning as we understand them. They suggest that the possible reason for commonality is that both whale songs and human languages ​​are culturally learned.

“The physical distribution of words and sounds in languages ​​is a truly fascinating feature, but there are millions of other things about languages ​​that are completely different from whale songs,” Enfield says.

In another study It was released this week, Mason Young Blood At Stony Brook University in New York, we found that other marine mammals may also have structural similarities to human language in communication.

Menzeras' law predicting that sentences with more words should consist of shorter words were present in 11 of the 16 species of disease studied. The ZIPF abbreviation law was discovered in two of the five types in which the available data can now be detected.

“To sum up, our research suggests that humpback whale songs have evolved to be more efficient and easier to learn, and that these features can be found in the level of notes within the phrase, phrases within the song. I'm doing it,” Youngblood says.

“Importantly, the evolution of these songs is also biological and cultural. Although some features, such as Menzerath's Law, can emerge through the biological evolution of voice devices, Other features such as the rank frequency method of ZIPF are [the Zipfian distribution]there may be times when cultural communication of songs between individuals is necessary,” he says.