Noumea;
Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU);
Institute of Marine Science;
Long Marine Laboratory;
Edinburgh;
Noumea. New Caledonia;
Australia;
USA||Southern Ocean Persistent Organic Pollutants Programs (SOPOPP). Griffith University;
Scottish Oceans Institute;
University of St Andrews;
Ifremer);
UK.||Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution;
School of Biological Sciences;
Psychology Department;
University of California;
Israel;
Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Laboratory;
University of Edinburgh;
QLD;
Aotearoa New Zealand;
Hebrew University;
Universite de La Reunion;
St Andrews;
Centre for Language Evolution;
CNRS;
Jerusalem;
UMR ENTROPIE (IRD;
University of Auckland-Waipapa Taumata Rau;
Santa Cruz;
School of Biology;
UK.;
New Caledonia||Operation Cetaces;
Universite de la Nouvelle-Caledonie;
Nathan;
IRD;
Auckland;
期刊名称：
Science
i s s n：
0036-8075
年卷期：
2025 年
387 卷
Feb.7 TN.6734 期
页 码：
649-653
页 码：
摘 要：
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 evolutionary distant species, points to the role of learning and cultural transmission in the emergence of properties thought to be unique to human language.
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