Who is listening to whale song? Quite a lot of people it turns out, and those who are filtering it out of their data are missing an opportunity for greater understanding of
Who is listening to whale song? Quite a lot of people it turns out, and those who are filtering it out of their data are missing an opportunity for greater understanding of humans, whales and oceans.
Earlier this year, a group of linguists, developmental scientists, marine biologists and behavioral ecologists from Griffith University in Australia considered how human babies discover words in speech and how this might be related to the fact that language is culturally transmitted.
There’s a law that is relevant: Zipf's law which when applied to language states that the most common word occurs about n times the n-th most common one. As an example, “the” is often about twice as commonly used in written text as the next most common word “of”. Apparently, “the” accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences and “of” accounts for around 3.5%. "And" comes in at about 2.8%.
The Griffith University team studied eight years of humpback recordings and found these same statistical characteristics present in whale song.
In humans, these properties help language be passed from one generation to the next. Perhaps the same is true for whales.
MBARI also released
Content Original Link:
" target="_blank">
