IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0070284.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

At Grammatical Faculty of Language, Flies Outsmart Men

Author

Listed:
  • Ruedi Stoop
  • Patrick Nüesch
  • Ralph Lukas Stoop
  • Leonid A Bunimovich

Abstract

Using a symbolic dynamics and a surrogate data approach, we show that the language exhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila (‘D.’) during courtship is as grammatically complex as the most complex human-spoken modern languages. This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visually frame-by-frame dissected into 37 fundamental behavioral elements. From the symbolic dynamics of these elements, the courtship-generating language was determined with extreme confidence (significance level > 0.95). The languages categorization in terms of position in Chomsky’s hierarchical language classification allows to compare Drosophila’s body language not only with computer’s compiler languages, but also with human-spoken languages. Drosophila’s body language emerges to be at least as powerful as the languages spoken by humans.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruedi Stoop & Patrick Nüesch & Ralph Lukas Stoop & Leonid A Bunimovich, 2013. "At Grammatical Faculty of Language, Flies Outsmart Men," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(8), pages 1-5, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0070284
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070284
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070284
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070284&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0070284?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0070284. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.