All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is ...

The sound is sharp, spare and strange, a burst of clicks cutting through seawater. For years, researchers treated those sperm whale signals mostly as timing patterns, measuring pauses and rhythms the ...

Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our ...

Sperm whales communicate using short sequences of clicks known as codas, which they exchange while coordinating within their groups. Scientists have long classified these sequences using the number of ...

New research from UC Berkeley’s Linguistics Department, in collaboration with Project CETI, suggests that sperm whale communication may mirror the structure and complexity of human language far more ...