Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language

Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language
- August 7, 2026
- Richard Futrell, language science, weighs in via Scientific American and Yahoo News
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Zipf’s law states that a handful of words—or, in this case, chirps, whistles and trills—occur frequently, while most are rare. … Richard Futrell, a computational linguist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new study, notes that “there are a million different things that can give rise to Zipf’s law.”
For the full story, please visit Scientific American.
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