White-Headed Langur Loud Calls for Zipf's and Menzerath's Law Analysis

Original research data and analysis code investigating whether non-human primate vocalizations adhere to Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath's law. The dataset contains long-distance loud calls from adult male white-headed langurs (Trachypithecus leucocephalus), a highly social colobine primate. Author Yinshu Liu uploaded the 1.0 MB XLSX file to figshare in April 2026 under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Test Zipf's law of abbreviation based on call frequency and duration data.
• Analyze Menzerath's law based on the relationship between call sequence size and constituent call length.
• Compare primate vocal compression efficiency to principles of human language design.
• Model optimal coding efficiency in animal communication systems.

Strengths

• Includes original analysis and plotting code, facilitating reproducibility.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, allowing for broad reuse.
• Focuses on a specific, highly social primate species (Trachypithecus leucocephalus).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic or observational bias inherent to the single-species study.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Likely contains recorded and annotated loud calls from field observations.

Time Range

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Freshness

Last updated 2026-04 23 15:57:58; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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