Linguistic laws in primate vocal communication

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• Prof Stuart Semple, University of Roehampton
• Wednesday 27 January 2016, 16:30-17:30
• BioAnth Lecture Theatre (Room 41), Division of Biological Anthropology, Pembroke Street, Cambridge, CB2 3QG.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Aurélien Mounier.

A fundamental goal of the life sciences is to identify universal biological principles – the basic rules of organisation that underpin diverse natural phenomena. In this talk, I will argue that one way to identify such principles is to explore the universality outside our own species of the common statistical patterns of human language known as linguistic laws. I will firstly describe two linguistic laws, Zipf’s law of brevity and Menzerath’s law, and explain the tests we have carried out to see if they hold in non-human primate vocal communication. I will then describe the common mathematical principle that we have demonstrated to lie behind these two laws, and explain why we feel this may be a universal principle underpinning not only primate vocal communication, including human language, but also biological information systems much more broadly.

This talk is part of the Biological Anthropology Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Biological Anthropology Seminars and Events
• BioAnth Lecture Theatre (Room 41), Division of Biological Anthropology, Pembroke Street, Cambridge, CB2 3QG
• Biological Anthropology Seminar Series
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• ji247's list

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