Penguin vocabulary similar to humans, study finds
By Hannah Sparks, New York Post, February 5, 2020
African Penguins, Shutterstock photo
We humans like to get to the point and new research reveals that penguins aren’t wasting their breath either.
A new study by Italian researchers shows “compelling evidence” that African penguins communicate in a pattern similar to humans — a trait that has never been observed in animals, other than primates.
The study was published in the journal Biology Letters.
These terrestrial birds share two principles of human speech: Zipf’s law of brevity, which states that the most frequently uttered words are single-syllable words; and the Menzerath-Altmann law, which asserts that the longer the sentence the shorter the clauses or words within it.
Scientists recorded 590 “ecstatic display songs” — a polite way of saying mating call — sung by 28 uncoupled adult birds throughout three different penguin colonies in Italian zoos. They note that the sound is similar to a donkey’s bray, earning them the nickname the “jackass penguin.”
The research reveals that the African penguins’ songs contain three types of syllables and that the shortest syllable sounds are the most often used in their vocalizations. Researchers also observe that the longer the song, the shorter the syllables used. This same trend can be heard in humans, whose most-used words are also the shortest, such as “the,” “of” and “a.”
Penguins are just like people in other ways, too, such as their tendency toward monogamy, as well as the prevalence of same-sex partnerships.
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