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Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These properties facilitate learning and may therefore arise because of their contribution to the faithful transmission of language over multiple cultural generations. If so, we would expect to find them in other culturally transmitted systems. In this study, we applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovering in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. This commonality, in two evolutionarily distant species, points to the role of learning and cultural transmission in the emergence of properties thought to be unique to human language. 

The noun–verb distinction has long been considered a fundamental property of human language, and has been found in some form even in the earliest stages of language emergence, including homesign and the early generations of emerging sign languages. We present two experimental studies that use silent gesture to investigate how noun–verb distinctions develop in the manual modality through two key processes: (i) improvising using novel signals by individuals, and (ii) using those signals in the interaction between communicators. We operationalise communicative interaction in two ways: a setting in which members of the dyad were in separate booths and were given a comprehension test after each stimulus vs. a more naturalistic face-to-face conversation without comprehension checks. There were few differences between the two conditions, highlighting the robustness of the paradigm. Our findings from both experiments reflect patterns found in naturally emerging sign languages. Some formal distinctions arise in the earliest stages of improvisation and do not require interaction to develop. However, the full range of formal distinctions between nouns and verbs found in naturally emerging language did not appear with either improvisation or interaction, suggesting that transmitting the language to a new generation of learners might be necessary for these properties to emerge.