Birdsong and whale song show patterns similar to human language and is unconsciously learnt as babies

Amazing stuff!

"An international team of researchers has uncovered a previously undetected structure in the birdsong of Bengalese finches that has the same statistical patterns found in human languages. ...

The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, build on the team's previous discovery that humpback whales also rely on a similar systematic structure. ..."

From the abstract:

"All languages have statistically coherent subsequences (e.g., words) whose frequency distribution follows a power law. 

These properties facilitate language learning in humans, making them good candidates for arising through cultural transmission as a way to help faithful transmission across generations.

Recently, both properties were found in whale song, which is also culturally transmitted, leading to the strong prediction that they should be found wherever complex sequential signaling is culturally transmitted.

Here, we use the same tools used to analyze human data and whale song to reveal that culturally transmitted Bengalese finch song also has statistically coherent subsequences whose distribution follows a power law.

We additionally show that statistical coherence increases over development, but the power law is present throughout, suggesting that it reflects a fundamental principle of learned representations.

Finding these parallels between evolutionarily distant species illustrates the importance of cultural transmission in shaping communication and suggests that core properties of language arise through convergent evolution."

Birdsong and whale song show patterns similar to human language

Do Birds Learn Like Babies? New Hebrew University Study Finds Language-Like Patterns in Finch Songs (original news release) "It turns out that songbirds, humpback whales, and human babies may all rely on the same hidden mathematical rules when learning to communicate.

A new study reveals that Bengalese finches organize their songs using the same statistical patterns found in human speech—an evolutionary solution that makes complex communication easier to learn and pass from one generation to the next. The discovery suggests that some of language’s most fundamental building blocks may not be uniquely human after all, but a universal feature of learned communication."

Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong (open access)

Fig. 3. Detected subsequences follow a Zipfian distribution throughout development, but their statistical coherence and slope increase as they approach the adult target.