Abstract
We show that dolphin whistle types tend to be used in specific behavioral contexts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphin whistle have some sort of “meaning”. Besides, in some cases, it can be shown that the behavioral context in which a whistle tends to occur or not occur is shared by different individuals, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphins are communicating through whistles. Furthermore, we show that the number of behavioral contexts significantly associated with a certain whistle type tends to grow with the frequency of the whistle type, a pattern that is reminiscent of a law of word meanings stating, as a tendency, that the higher the frequency of a word, the higher its number of meanings. Our findings indicate that the presence of Zipf's law in dolphin whistle types cannot be explained with enough detail by a simplistic die rolling experiment.
Highlights
Many quantitative laws of human language are known
As for the connection with laws of human language, we have found that more frequent whistle types tend to be associated to more behavioral contexts, a feature that is reminiscent of a law of word meaning stating, as a tendency, that the higher the frequency of a word, the higher its number of meanings [4,12,13]
We have seen that the statistical properties of the mapping of dolphins whistle types into meanings is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphins whistles have some sort of “meaning” and that dolphins are communicating through them: whistle type use is constrained by the behavioral context and it can be shown that these constraints are shared by different individuals in some cases
Summary
Many quantitative laws of human language are known. Some examples are the law of brevity, Zipf‟s law for word frequencies and Menzerath-Altmann‟s law [1,2]. The law of brevity states that more frequent words tend to be shorter [1]. Zipf‟s law for word frequencies states that f(i), the frequency of the i-th most frequent word of a text obeys approximately [1,3]:. Menzerath-Altmann‟s law states that the longer a construct, the shorter its components [2]. For the particular case of the length of a word with respect to the length of its syllables, Menzerath-Altmann‟s law yields that the longer a word, the shorter its syllables. Notice that we use the term law to refer to statistical patterns or tendencies, as is traditionally done in quantitative linguistics and cognitive science, which is different than the stronger sense of the term law used in physics, e.g., Newton‟s laws of motion
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