Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated
by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines …

Simple Summary Identifying vocalisations of given species from passive acoustic recordings
is a common step in bioacoustics. While manual labelling and identification are widespread …

Animal songs differ from calls in function and structure, and have comparative and
translational value, showing similarities to human music. Rhythm in music is often distributed …

Vocal communication systems in humans and other animals experience selection for
efficiency—optimizing the benefits they convey relative to the costs of producing them. Two …

Parent-offspring interactions are essential to interpret animal social evolution and behavior,
but their role in mediating acoustic communication in animals that interact vocally is still …

Strepsirrhine vocalisations are extraordinarily diverse and cross-species comparisons are
needed to explore how this variability evolved. We contributed to the investigation of primate …

Menzerath's law is a quantitative linguistic law which states that, on average, the longer is a
linguistic construct, the shorter are its constituents. In contrast, Menzerath-Altmann's law …

Contrary to spontaneous yawning, yawn contagion occurs when yawning in a subject
(responder) is elicited by the yawns of others (triggers). Yawn contagion has been …

The study of vocal communication in non-human animals can uncover the roots of human
languages. Recent studies of language have focused on two linguistic laws: Zipf's law and …

Compression has been presented as a general principle of animal communication. Zipf's
Law of brevity is a manifestation of this postulate and can be generalized as the tendency of …