| Title: | Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication |
| Author(s): | Hernandez-Fernandez A; Torre IG; |
| Address: | "Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Lab, Institut de Ciencies de l'Educacio, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Av. Doctor Maranon 44-50, Barcelona 08028, Catalonia, Spain. Language and Speech Laboratory, Universidad del Pais Vasco, Justo Velez de Elorriaga Kalea, 1, 01006 Vitoria, Spain. Departamento de Matematica Aplicada, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Avda. Puerta de Hierro, 2-4, 28040 Madrid, Spain" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 1744-957X (Electronic) 1744-9561 (Print) 1744-9561 (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "Compression has been presented as a general principle of animal communication. Zipf's Law of brevity is a manifestation of this postulate and can be generalized as the tendency of more frequent communicative elements to be shorter. Previous works supported this claim, showing evidence of Zipf's Law of brevity in animal acoustical communication and human language. However, a significant part of the communicative effort in biological systems is carried out in other transmission channels, such as those based on infochemicals. To fill this gap, we seek, for the first time, evidence of this principle in infochemical communication by analysing the statistical tendency of more frequent infochemicals to be chemically shorter and lighter. We analyse data from the largest and most comprehensive open-access infochemical database known as Pherobase, recovering Zipf's Law of brevity in interspecific communication (allelochemicals) but not in intraspecific communication (pheromones). Moreover, these results are robust even when addressing different magnitudes of study or mathematical approaches. Therefore, different dynamics from the compression principle would dominate intraspecific chemical communication, defying the universality of Zipf's Law of brevity. To conclude, we discuss the exception found for pheromones in the light of other potential communicative paradigms such as pressures on successful communication or the Handicap principle" |
| Keywords: | "*Animal Communication Animals Databases, Factual Humans *Language Pheromones communication compression infochemicals information theory language;" |
| Notes: | "MedlineHernandez-Fernandez, Antoni Torre, Ivan G eng England 2022/07/28 Biol Lett. 2022 Jul; 18(7):20220162. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0162. Epub 2022 Jul 27" |
