a law of word meaning in dolphin whistle types法律词义的海豚吹口哨类型.pdfVIP

Entropy 2009, 11, 688-701; doi:10.3390/ OPEN ACCESS entropy ISSN 1099-4300 /journal/entropy Article A Law of Word Meaning in Dolphin Whistle Types Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho 1,* and Brenda McCowan 2 1 TALP Research Center, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord, Edifici Omega, Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain 2 Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, UC Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA; E-Mail: bjmccowan@ * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: rferrericancho@. Received: 30 June 2009 / Accepted: 26 October 2009 / Published: 30 October 2009 Abstract: We show that dolphin whistle types tend to be used in specific behavioral contexts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphin whistle have some sort of “meaning”. Besides, in some cases, it can be shown that the behavioral context in which a whistle tends to occur or not occur is shared by different individuals, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphins are communicating through whistles. Furthermore, we show that the number of behavioral contexts significantly associated with a certain whistle type tends to grow with the frequency of the whistle type, a pattern that is reminiscent of a law of word meanings stating, as a tendency, that the higher the frequency of a word, the higher its nu