The sound is sharp, spare and strange, a burst of clicks cutting through seawater. For years, researchers treated those sperm ...

Analysis shows whales’ coda vocalizations are ‘highly complex’ and remarkably similar to our own ...

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is ...

Zipf’s Law states that the most common word in any language appears twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, ten times as often as the tenth. It is constant ...

The eye of a sperm whale. (Mike Korostelev/Moment/Getty Images) The staccato clicks of sperm whales may sound like ...

When linguists want to tell one vowel from another, they measure the peaks of acoustic energy that the human vocal tract ...