What the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songs
(Explore the hidden world of whale culture.)
Infants inspire a new way to study whales
A first indication of this came when researchers recorded a few whales in the process of changing their song, seamlessly replacing specific themes by new ones with a similar arrangement of sound elements. 'They were singing old and new themes smushed together, but it was really structured. This way, they'd transition nicely from one theme to the other, or replace the old theme with the new theme entirely. That was our first hint that segmentation was important,' says Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and one of the authors of the study.
Garland, who is also a National Geographic Explorer, has listened to hundreds of hours of whale songs for hundreds of hours and use short pauses and characteristic sequences to identify the individual elements they're made of. But when she saw Inbal Arnon, a psycholinguist at the Hebrew University in Israel, present her work on how infants learn to identify individual words in the stream of sound that is spoken language, they had an idea. 'What if I we applied the same logic to whale song? Would that work?'
Arnon and language evolution researcher Simon Kirby of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, had already developed an algorithm that applies similar principles to those children use to segment language. 'It basically learns how likely a certain sound is to be followed by another,' Arnon explains. 'Sounds that commonly co-occur are probably part of the same word. But if a sound is followed by another one that is rarely heard right after, that might be a new word.'
When Arnon and Kirby applied the algorithm to more than 30 hours of humpback songs Garland's team had recorded near New Caledonia, the song segments it detected were reassuringly close to those Garland would have identified herself—but not quite the same. And when they compared the frequency at which these different elements occurred, a pattern emerged that had only been found in humans before. The most common word—or in this case, song segment—occurred twice as often as the second most common one, thrice as often as the third most common one, and so on. Some segments are very frequent, many others quite rare.
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