Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language

Humpback Whale songs have statistical models that are similar to those seen in human language in their structure. This does not mean that although the songs convey complex meanings such as our sentences, whales begin to understand that humans begin to understand humans.

Men’s Humpback whales only (Megaptera novaeangliae) Sing, and behavior thought it was important to attract friends. The songs are constantly evolving, with the new elements that appear through the population, until the old song is replaced with a completely new.

“We believe that they are like a normalized test, everyone needs to do the same task, but you can make changes and decorations to show you better in the tasks,” says Jenny Allen Griffith University Gold Coast, Australia.

Instead of trying to seek meaning in the songs, Allen and his colleagues were looking for structural models that may be similar to those seen in the human language. The eight years of whaling songs recorded around Caledia in the Pacific Ocean.

The researcher began by creating alphanumeric codes to represent all songs from all records, including about 150 special sounds. “Basically, it is a different set of sounds, so they can make rumors of the tap for a year, so we will have another year, so it would complain, and so it would be CBA,” says Allen.

When all the songs were coded, a group of linguists had to figure out what so much to analyze their data. The progress came when the researchers decided to use the study technique on how babies discover words, it is called transition probability.

“The lecture is constant and there is no interruption between words, so babies must know the word limits,” says Inugal Arnon At the University of Jerusalem. “To do this they use low-level statistical information: Sounds occur together if they are part of the same word. Babies use these uses in the probability that a sound continues to know the word limits.”

For example, in the phrase “nice flowers”, a child intuitively recognizes “Pre-” and “TTY” syllables to go over “TTY” and “flow”. “If the song has a similar statistical structure, these clues should also be useful to segment,” Arnon says.

Using alphanumeric versions of the whale songs, the Group followed the process of transition between sound elements, when the next sound item was amazing.

“These cutting songs are distributed in segmenting sub-sequences,” Arnon says. “Then it seemed to us to look at their distribution and it was amazing that they follow the same distribution found in all human languages.”

In this model, the so-called Zipfia distribution, the prevalence of less common words falls in the predictive way. Another striking discovery is that the most common whale sounds are usually short, as the most common human words.

Nick Enfield Sydney University, who did not participate in the study, says it’s a new way of analyzing the whale song. “What does it mean if you study War and peaceThe most common word will be as more frequent as next and so on – and researchers identified a similar pattern in whaling songs, “he noted.

Team member Simon Kirby From the University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom, he said he didn’t think the method would work. “I’ll never forget the moment that graph showed, as we know so well from man,” he says. “This realized that we would find a profound commonity between these two species, separating tens of million years.”

However, researchers emphasize that this statistical model does not result in the language he understands the meaning of the whale song. They suggest that it is a possible reason for the community that they learn the song of whaling and cultural human language.

“Physical distribution of language words or sounds is a wonderful feature, but there are one million other things about the language that are very different songs of whales,” Says Enfield.

In a separate study Posted this week, Mason Youngblood The other sea mammals found at Stony Brook University in New York can have structural resemblance to human beings in their communication.

Menzerrath law envisions that sentences with more words were made up of short words, there were 16 species of species studied 11. Zipf’s abbreviation law found two of the five species, allowed to perceive the available data.

“Taken together, our research suggests that the Humpback whale songs have been more efficient and easier to learn more efficiently, and these features can be found at the level of notes within the sentences,” says Youngblood.

“Important is the biological and cultural evolution of the menzer, according to the Law of the menzer, can be created through the biological evolution of the vocal system, as a cultural transmission of songs between ZIPF” He noted.