Dolphin speak ‘relies on brevity’
It’s not only humans who strive for efficiency when communicating, even dolphins rely on brevity while speaking — a phenomenon known as the “law of brevity”, a new study has revealed.
In their long-term quest to understand how complex communication systems developed, an international team, led by University of Aberdeen, chose to study dolphins as the animals are far removed from humans on the evolutionary tree.
They diverged from humans some 65 million years ago, and their brains are built differently from ours. At the same time, dolphins are known to communicate with a repertoire of about 30 non-vocal behaviours.
The scientists broke down each of these 30 behaviours into individual units. A side flip, for example, requires a dolphin to jump and land on its side for a total of two units. Head butting takes four units, as two individuals jump, hit and use their heads.
After hundreds of hours of observation and analyses, they concluded that dolphins perform simple, one-move behaviours more often than complicated, multi-faceted actions.
Lead scientist David Lusseau was quoted by the ‘ABC Science’ as saying: “The more you’re going to have to say something, the shorter you want it to be so that you can diminish the amount of time it takes you to communicate.
“The listener is trying to make the least effort possible to understand what is said to him or her. The speaker is trying to make the least effort possible to communicate.”
Until now, scientists had never documented the law of brevity in another species, but research behaviourist Dr Brenda McCowan suspects that dolphins and humans aren’t the only ones who use it.
Systems of communication, she says, might simply need to be structured in certain ways in order to work. “This work contributes to the growing body of data that humans are not as unique as once thought and that we have profound similarities in our behaviour and communication with other animals.”
Bureau Report
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