Dear colleagues,

My co-authors and I are pleased to announce our recent publication in Science:

Arnon I, Kirby S, Allen JA, Garrigue C, Carroll EL, Garland EC (2025) Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science 387 (6734), 649-653.

ABSTRACT
Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These properties facilitate learning and may therefore arise because of their contribution to the faithful transmission of language over multiple cultural generations. If so, we would expect to find them in other culturally transmitted systems. In this study, we applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovering in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. This commonality, in two evolutionarily distant species, points to the role of learning and cultural transmission in the emergence of properties thought to be unique to human language.

The paper is available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055

You can also email me (ecg5@st-andrews.ac.uk) for a PDF copy.

Kind regards,

Ellen

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Dr Ellen C. Garland  (she/her)
Royal Society University Research Fellow

Email: ecg5@st-andrews.ac.uk
Ph: +44 (0)7478-649964

WWW: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/biology/people/ecg5

Bluesky: @ellengarland.bsky.social  

Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), Scottish Oceans Institute, School of Biology, University of St Andrews
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The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No SC013532