The Law of Brevity in Macaque Vocal Communication is not an Artefact of Analysing Mean Call Durations∗

ABSTRACT Words follow the law of brevity, i.e. more frequent words tend to be shorter. From a statistical point of view, this qualitative definition of the law states that word length and word frequency are negatively correlated. Here the recent finding of patterning consistent with the law of brevity in Formosan macaque vocal communication (Semple, Hsu, & Agoramoorthy, 2010) is revisited. It is shown that the negative correlation between mean duration and frequency of use in the vocalizations of Formosan macaques is not an artefact of the use of a mean duration for each call type instead of the customary ‘word’ length of studies of the law in human language. The key point demonstrated is that the total duration of calls of a particular type increases with the number of calls of that type. The finding of the law of brevity in the vocalizations of these macaques therefore defies a trivial explanation.

[1]  George Kingsley Zipf,et al.  Human behavior and the principle of least effort , 1949 .

[2]  Minna J. Hsu,et al.  The vocal repertoire of formosan macaques, Macaca cyclopis : Acoustic structure and behavioral context , 2005 .

[3]  John R. Buck,et al.  The use of Zipf's law in animal communication analysis , 2005, Animal Behaviour.

[4]  Thomas M. Cover,et al.  Elements of Information Theory , 2005 .

[5]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  A Law of Word Meaning in Dolphin Whistle Types , 2009, Entropy.

[6]  Govindasamy Agoramoorthy,et al.  Efficiency of coding in macaque vocal communication , 2010, Biology Letters.

[7]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  Random Texts Do Not Exhibit the Real Zipf's Law-Like Rank Distribution , 2010, PloS one.

[8]  G. A. Miller,et al.  Finitary models of language users , 1963 .

[9]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  The self-organization of genomes , 2010, Complex..

[10]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  The Failure of the Law of Brevity in Two New World Primates. Statistical Caveats. , 2012, ArXiv.

[11]  E. P..  Animal Behaviour , 1901, Nature.

[12]  J. Urry.  Complexity , 2006, Interpreting Art.

[13]  Gabriel Altmann,et al.  Word Length and Word Frequency , 2007 .

[14]  David Lusseau,et al.  Compression as a Universal Principle of Animal Behavior , 2013, Cogn. Sci..

[15]  M. N. Vidya,et al.  The Relationship between Word Length and Frequency in Indian Languages , 2009 .

[16]  Wentian Li,et al.  Menzerath's law at the gene-exon level in the human genome , 2012, Complex..

[17]  Thomas M. Cover,et al.  Elements of information theory (2. ed.) , 2006 .

[18]  A. Radford,et al.  Brevity is not always a virtue in primate communication , 2011, Biology Letters.

[19]  David Lusseau,et al.  Efficient coding in dolphin surface behavioral patterns , 2009, Complex..

[20]  Ricard V. Solé,et al.  Genome size, self-organization and DNA's dark matter , 2010, Complex..

[21]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  Random models of Menzerath-Altmann law in genomes , 2012, Biosyst..

[22]  Eugene Galanter,et al.  Handbook of mathematical psychology: I. , 1963 .

[23]  Deng Yaochen.  A Quantitative Linguistic Study on the Relationship between Word Length and Word Frequency , 2013 .

[24]  LAURANCE R. DOYLE,et al.  Quantitative tools for comparing animal communication systems: information theory applied to bottlenose dolphin whistle repertoires , 1999, Animal Behaviour.

[25]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  Size of the Whole versus Number of Parts in Genomes , 2011, Entropy.

[26]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  The span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences , 2012, 1205.0321.