Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.

ABSTRACT: Two language laws have been identified as consistent patterns shaping animal behaviour, both acting on the organizational level of communicative systems. Zipf's law of brevity describes a negative relationship between behavioural length and frequency. Menzerath's law defines a negative correlation between the number of behaviours in a sequence and average length of the behaviour composing it. Both laws have been linked with the information-theoretic principle of compression, which tends to minimize code length. We investigated their presence in a case study of male chimpanzee sexual solicitation gesture. We failed to find evidence supporting Zipf's law of brevity, but solicitation gestures followed Menzerath's law: longer sequences had shorter average gesture duration. Our results extend p

SUBMITTER: Safryghin A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9653249 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature