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Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats

Watson, Stuart Kyle; Zali, Mara; Falk, Nikola; Widmer, Paul; Manser, Marta B (2024). Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath’s Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats. Royal Society Open Science, 11(12):241351.

Abstract

Diverse information encoding systems, including human language, the vocal and gestural systems of non-human animals and the structure of DNA and proteins, have been found to conform to ‘Menzerath’s Law’—a negative relationship between the number of units composing a sequence, and the size of those units. Here, we test for the presence of Menzerath’s Law in the vocal bouts produced in a submissive context by meerkats (Suricata suricatta). Using a suite of Bayesian mixed effects models, we examined 1676 vocal bouts produced by 89 wild meerkats, ranging from 1 to 590 calls in length, to determine whether the number of calls composing each bout had a negative relationship with the duration of those calls or their inter-call intervals. In contradiction to Menzerath’s Law, we found that the duration of vocalizations had a positive relationship with the number of calls in a bout. However, the duration of intervals between calls did have a negative relationship with bout size. Moreover, both calls and intervals had longer durations the closer they were positioned to the end of the bout. These findings highlight the multi-faceted ways in which efficiency trade-offs can occur in the vocal repertoires of non-human animals, shaping variability in the production of signal forms.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:07 Faculty of Science > Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies
06 Faculty of Arts > Department of Comparative Language Science
06 Faculty of Arts > Zurich Center for Linguistics
Dewey Decimal Classification:410 Linguistics
490 Other languages
590 Animals (Zoology)
570 Life sciences; biology
890 Other literatures
Uncontrolled Keywords:animal communication, vocal behaviour, Menzerath’s Law, quantitative linguistics
Language:English
Date:1 December 2024
Deposited On:17 Jan 2025 08:45
Last Modified:29 Jan 2025 05:55
Publisher:Royal Society Publishing
ISSN:2054-5703
OA Status:Gold
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241351
Project Information:
  • Funder: SNSF
  • Grant ID: 51NF40_180888
  • Project Title: NCCR Evolving Language (phase I)
  • Funder: European Research Council
  • Grant ID: 294494
  • Project Title:
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  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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