Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language

Huds’s whale songs contain statistical patterns in its structure, which are significantly similar to those seen in the human language. Although this does not mean that songs convey complicated meanings like our camel, they indicate that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start understanding the language.

Only the epidemiological male whales (Megaptera NovaeangliaeSinging, and it is believed that behavior is important to attract his colleagues. Songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spread across the population until the old song is completely replaced with new panels.

“We think it is somewhat similar to a unified test, as everyone should do the same task, but you can make changes and decorate to show that you are better in the task than anyone else,” he says. Jenny Allen At the University of Griffiths, Gold Coast, Australia.

Instead of trying to find meaning in songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that may be similar to those seen in the human language. They analyzed eight years of whale songs recorded about New Calidonia in the Pacific Ocean.

The researchers began creating digital alphabet to represent each song from each recording, including about 150 unique votes in total. “It is essentially a different set of sounds, so they may make a year of ethnicity, so we will have Aab, then another year they may have been leaving, and so it will be CBA,” Allen says.

Once all the songs encrypted, a team of linguists had to know the best ways to analyze a lot of data. This penetration came when the researchers decided to use an analysis technique that applies to how children discover words, called the transitional possibility.

He says: “The speech continues and there is no stop between words, so children must discover the limits of words.” Inbal Arnon At Jerusalem University. “To do this, they use low -level statistical information: specifically, the sounds are likely to occur together if they are part of the same word. Infants use these declines at the possibility of one another voice to discover the limits of words.”

For example, in the phrase “Beautiful Flowers”, the child is intuitively aware that the clips “before” and “TTY” are more likely to assemble more than “TTY” and “Flow”. “If the song has a similar statistical structure, this sermon should be useful for its fragmentation as well,” says Arnon.

Using the digital alphabet of whale songs, the team calculated the transitional possibilities between successive vocal elements, making it a discount when the following sound element was surprising given the previous element.

“These song cuts are divided into fragmented subtitles,” says Arnon. “Then we looked at their distribution and found, surprisingly, that they follow the same distribution in all human languages.”

In this style, which is called Zipfian, the spread of less common words decreases in a predictable way. Another amazing discovery is that the most common whales sounds tend to be short, just as they are the most common human words – a known rule of Zipf’s law for privatization.

Nick Infield At the University of Sydney, which did not participate in the study, it says it is a new way to analyze the whale song. “What this means is that if you analyze War and peaceHe says: “The most common word will be twice its repetition like the next and so on – and the researchers have identified a similar pattern in the whale songs,” he says.

team member Simon Kirby At the University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom, he says he does not think the method will work. He says: “I will never forget the moment when the graph appeared, and it seems exactly like that we know well from the human language.” “This made us realize that we have discovered deep common denominators between these two types, separating tens of millions of years of development.”

However, the researchers emphasize that this statistical pattern does not lead to the conclusion that the whale song is a language that transmits meaning as we understand it. They suggest that a potential reason for common themes is that both whale and human language are culturally learned.

“The material distribution of words or sounds in the language is a really great advantage, but there is a million thing about the language that is completely different from the whale song,” says Infield.

In a separate study Published this week, Masson Youngopod At Stone Brock University in New York, I found that other marine mammals may have structural similarities with the human language in connection.

The Menzerath Law, which predicts that the sentences with more words should consist of shorter words, on 11 out of 16 types of cytassin studied. The ZIPF shortcut law was found in two of every five types, where the available data was able to discover.

“Combined, our studies indicate that the Hambah whale song has evolved to be more efficient and easier to learn, and that these features can be found at the level of notes inside phrases and phrases inside songs,” says Youngblood.

More importantly, the development of these songs is biological and cultural. Some features, such as Menzeth, may appear, through the biological development of the audio system, while other features, such as the Frequency Law in ZipF [the Zipfian distribution]”The cultural transition of songs may require individuals,” he says.