Phylogeny and mechanisms of shared hierarchical patterns in birdsong

Linguistic laws in biology

“…In animal communication, patterns consistent with Menzerath's law are seen in primate vocal sequences [26,52,[63][64][65] and bird song [22,27], as well as in the gestural communication of chimpanzees [23]. However, vocal sequences of a number of primate and bird species do not follow this law [27,66].…”

“…Such bottom-up development of general theory then facilitates a top-down approach, driving empirical work and hypothesis development at lower levels. For example, James et al [27] built on this general theory to explore how production mechanisms and learning contribute to the emergence of Menzerath's law in bird song, and proposed the hypothesis that ease of motor production underpins compressional organization in this communication system.…”

“…Biologists have tested for patterns consistent with linguistic laws among diverse taxa and different levels of biological organisation -molecular [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], organismal [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and ecological [28][29][30][31] (see Table 1). This work necessitates more general formulations of these laws, which originally were framed in specific linguistic constructs.…”

Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species

“…Thus, animal culture, communicative or otherwise, should be under a similar pressure for learnability. While experimental work is scarce, this is supported by evidence of Menzeranth's Law in animal communication systems [96][97][98][99]. Non-communicative animal behaviour lacks a pressure for expressivity to stave off degeneration, but there are plenty of other pressures for maintaining complexity, as behaviours must still generate pay-offs for an animal to remain in their repertoire.…”

“…In animal communication, Menzerath's Law states 'the greater the whole, the smaller the parts'. A recent comparative study has demonstrated this principle in bird song [96], although the authors suggest that this is owing to motor production biases rather than a result of informational bottlenecks. Menzerath's Law is also increasingly described in primate gestural and vocal communication [97][98][99].…”