Scientists find whale song, human language share same structure

International scientists have found that whale noises and songs share the same structural pattern as human language. The scientists analyzed the groans, moans, whistles, barks, shrieks and squeaks in humpback whale song recordings collected over eight years in New Caledonia, located in the South Pacific. "Their noises and our words share a common pattern," said Emma Carroll, a marine biologist at the University of Auckland and an expert in whale genetics. She added that the finding is "something truly fascinating." While this doesn't mean whales have a language, it could point to similarities in how the communication systems of two evolutionarily distant species have evolved and how they are learned, Carroll said. Across human languages, the most commonly used word appears about twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third, and so on. The words used most frequently are very short, such as "the," "of" and "and." When the whale song was divided into segments, the researchers found that the same rules of frequency and brevity apply. In the paper published in the journal Science, the researchers argue that this structure may aid "learnability," just as it does for humans. Humpback whale song is one of the most complex acoustic displays in the animal kingdom, a striking example of socially learned, culturally transmitted behavior. Performed only by males, the song likely plays a role in mate selection. A song can last up to 20 minutes and involves many sound types arranged into a pattern, according to the research. Once thought to be unique to humans, it may turn out that foundational aspects of human language are shared across species, the researchers said.

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