MDPI - Publisher of Open Access Journals

12 pages, 853 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bottlenose Dolphins’ Clicks Comply with Three Laws of Efficient Communication

by Arthur Stepanov, Hristo Zhivomirov, Ivaylo Nedelchev, Todor Ganchev and Penka Stateva

Algorithms 2025, 18(7), 392; https://doi.org/10.3390/a18070392 - 27 Jun 2025

Viewed by 1112

Bottlenose dolphins’ broadband click vocalisations are well-studied in the literature concerning their echolocation function. Their potential use for communication among conspecifics has long been speculated but has yet to be conclusively established. In this study, we first categorised dolphins’ click production based on their amplitude contour and then analysed the distribution of individual clicks and click sequences against their duration and length. The results show that the repertoire and composition of clicks and click sequences adhere to the three essential linguistic laws of efficient communication: Zipf’s rank–frequency law, the law of brevity, and the Menzerath–Altmann law. Conforming to the rank–frequency law suggests that clicks may form a linguistic code subject to selective pressures for unification, on the one hand, and diversification, on the other. Conforming to the other two laws also implies that dolphins use clicks according to the compression criterion or minimisation of code length without losing information. Such conformity of dolphin clicks might indicate that these linguistic laws are more general, which produces an exciting research perspective on animal communication. Full article

(This article belongs to the Collection Feature Papers in Algorithms)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

24 pages, 10150 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution

by Natalia L. Tsizhmovska and Leonid M. Martyushev

Entropy 2024, 26(3), 180; https://doi.org/10.3390/e26030180 - 21 Feb 2024

Viewed by 1587

Abstract

In this paper, word length in the texts of public speeches by USA and UK politicians is analyzed. More than 300 speeches delivered over the past two hundred years were studied. It is found that the lognormal distribution better describes the distribution of word length than do the Weibull and Poisson distributions, for example. It is shown that the length of words does not change significantly over time (the average value either does not change or slightly decreases, and the mode slightly increases). These results are fundamentally different from those obtained previously for sentence lengths and indicate that, in terms of quantitative linguistic analysis, the word length in politicians’ speech has not evolved over the last 200 years and does not obey the principle of least effort proposed by G. Zipf. Full article

► Show Figures

Figure 1

13 pages, 1198 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Secondary Structures of Proteins Follow Menzerath–Altmann Law

by Vladimír Matlach, Daniel Dostál and Marian Novotný

Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022, 23(3), 1569; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23031569 - 29 Jan 2022

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2553

Abstract

This article examines the presence of the empirical tendency known as the Menzerath–Altmann Law (MAL) on protein secondary structures. MAL is related to optimization principles observed in natural languages and in genetic information on chromosomes or protein domains. The presence of MAL is examined on a non-redundant dataset of 4728 proteins by verifying significant, negative correlations and testing classical and newly proposed formulas by fitting the observed trend. We conclude that the lengths of secondary structures are specifically dependent on their number inside the protein sequence, while possibly reflecting the formula proposed in this paper. This behavior is observed on average but is individually avoidable and possibly driven by a latent cost function. The data suggest that MAL could provide a useful guiding principle in protein design. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Molecular Recognition in Protein and Peptide Nanotechnology)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 2182 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Menzerath–Altmann’s Law of Syntax in RNA Accretion History

by Fengjie Sun and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés

Life 2021, 11(6), 489; https://doi.org/10.3390/life11060489 - 27 May 2021

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3152

Abstract

RNA evolves by adding substructural parts to growing molecules. Molecular accretion history can be dissected with phylogenetic methods that exploit structural and functional evidence. Here, we explore the statistical behaviors of lengths of double-stranded and single-stranded segments of growing tRNA, 5S rRNA, RNase P RNA, and rRNA molecules. The reconstruction of character state changes along branches of phylogenetic trees of molecules and trees of substructures revealed strong pushes towards an economy of scale. In addition, statistically significant negative correlations and strong associations between the average lengths of helical double-stranded stems and their time of origin (age) were identified with the Pearson’s correlation and Spearman’s rho methods. The ages of substructures were derived directly from published rooted trees of substructures. A similar negative correlation was detected in unpaired segments of rRNA but not for the other molecules studied. These results suggest a principle of diminishing returns in RNA accretion history. We show this principle follows a tendency of substructural parts to decrease their size when molecular systems enlarge that follows the Menzerath–Altmann’s law of language in full generality and without interference from the details of molecular growth. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue 2020: A 10 Years Journey—Advances in Life Sciences)

► Show Figures

Graphical abstract

16 pages, 1064 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish

by Antoni Hernández-Fernández, Iván G. Torre, Juan-María Garrido and Lucas Lacasa

Entropy 2019, 21(12), 1153; https://doi.org/10.3390/e21121153 - 26 Nov 2019

Cited by 24 | Viewed by 7290

Abstract

In this work we consider Glissando Corpus—an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish—and empirically analyze the presence of the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, Brevity law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law) in oral communication, and further complement this with the analysis of two recently formulated laws: lognormality law and size-rank law. By aligning the acoustic signal of speech production with the speech transcriptions, we are able to measure and compare the agreement of each of these laws when measured in both physical and symbolic units. Our results show that these six laws are recovered in both languages but considerably more emphatically so when these are examined in physical units, hence reinforcing the so-called ‘physical hypothesis’ according to which linguistic laws might indeed have a physical origin and the patterns recovered in written texts would, therefore, be just a byproduct of the regularities already present in the acoustic signals of oral communication. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Information Theory and Language)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

16 pages, 8585 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Size of the Whole versus Number of Parts in Genomes

by Antoni Hernández-Fernández, Jaume Baixeries, Núria Forns and Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Entropy 2011, 13(8), 1465-1480; https://doi.org/10.3390/e13081465 - 5 Aug 2011

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 7996

Abstract

It is known that chromosome number tends to decrease as genome size increases in angiosperm plants. Here the relationship between number of parts (the chromosomes) and size of the whole (the genome) is studied for other groups of organisms from different kingdoms. Two major results are obtained. First, the finding of relationships of the kind “the more parts the smaller the whole” as in angiosperms, but also relationships of the kind “the more parts the larger the whole”. Second, these dependencies are not linear in general. The implications of the dependencies between genome size and chromosome number are two-fold. First, they indicate that arguments against the relevance of the finding of negative correlations consistent with Menzerath-Altmann law (a linguistic law that relates the size of the parts with the size of the whole) in genomes are seriously flawed. Second, they unravel the weakness of a recent model of chromosome lengths based upon random breakage that assumes that chromosome number and genome size are independent. Full article

► Show Figures

Graphical abstract

Search Results (6)

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI

Saved Queries

Search Filter Reset All

Years

Feature Papers

Subjects

Journals

Article Types

Countries / Regions

Search Results (6)

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI