From collocations to call-ocations: using linguistic methods to quantify animal call combinations

Abstract

Emerging data in a range of non-human animal species have highlighted a latent ability to combine certain pre-existing calls together into larger structures. Currently, however, the quantification of context-specific call combinations has received less attention. This is problematic because animal calls can co-occur with one another simply through chance alone. One common approach applied in language sciences to identify recurrent word combinations is collocation analysis. Through comparing the co-occurrence of two words with how each Show more