This statistical rule is called Zipf’s law, and now, an interdisciplinary team of scientists has revealed that humpback whale songs follow the same pattern. In a study published Thursday in the ...

Human languages display a pattern known as Zipf’s law. Now, researchers have found the same pattern in whale song. In all known human languages there is a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in ...

We discovered that the same Zipfian pattern universally found across human languages also occurs in whale song. This complex signaling system, like human language, is culturally learned by each ...

That has changed, with this study reporting that whale songs contain recurring elements similar to those in spoken words. The team compared patterns in whale recordings to patterns in human language.

However, new research led by Dr Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews published in Science (Thursday 6 Februar, has uncovered the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human ...

Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found. In new research published today in Science, our team of ...

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