Hainan frilled treefrogs' calls partially conform to Menzerath–Altmann's law, but oppose Zipf's law of abbreviation

Deng, Ke; He, Yu-Xiao; Wang, Xiao-Ping; Wang, Tong-Liang; Wang, Ji-Chao; Chen, You-Hua; Cui, Jian-Guo

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.04.011

Animal Behaviour

2024

DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.04.011

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Hainan frilled treefrogs' calls partially conform to Menzerath–Altmann's law, but oppose Zipf's law of abbreviation

Ke Deng,

Yu-Xiao He,

Xiao-Ping Wang

et al.

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2024

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Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats

Watson,

Zali,

Falk

et al. 2024

R. Soc. Open Sci.

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Diverse information encoding systems, including human language, the vocal and gestural systems of non-human animals and the structure of DNA and proteins, have been found to conform to ‘Menzerath’s Law’—a negative relationship between the number of units composing a sequence, and the size of those units. Here, we test for the presence of Menzerath’s Law in the vocal bouts produced in a submissive context by meerkats ( Suricata suricatta ). Using a suite of Bayesian mixed effects models, we examined 1676 vocal bouts produced by 89 wild meerkats, ranging from 1 to 590 calls in length, to determine whether the number of calls composing each bout had a negative relationship with the duration of those calls or their inter-call intervals. In contradiction to Menzerath’s Law, we found that the duration of vocalizations had a positive relationship with the number of calls in a bout. However, the duration of intervals between calls did have a negative relationship with bout size. Moreover, both calls and intervals had longer durations the closer they were positioned to the end of the bout. These findings highlight the multi-faceted ways in which efficiency trade-offs can occur in the vocal repertoires of non-human animals, shaping variability in the production of signal forms.

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Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats

Watson,

Zali,

Falk

et al. 2024

R. Soc. Open Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

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Hainan frilled treefrogs' calls partially conform to Menzerath–Altmann's law, but oppose Zipf's law of abbreviation

Cited by 1 publication

References 42 publications

Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats

Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats

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