Testing methodological and population-specific influences on the detection of Zipf’s law of brevity in chimpanzee gestures

Zipf’s law of brevity is a widespread manifestation of information compression found across human languages and other communication systems. Chimpanzee gesture represents a rare absence of its expression in short-range communication. But, whether this absence reflects a feature of ape gesture production, or results from methodological obstacles or population differences is unclear. Selecting the appropriate unit of analysis is crucial for detecting linguistic patterns in any system. We assess gestural repertoires of three chimpanzee communities for Zipf’s law, while discriminating and testing different levels of unit durations (segmentation) and how finely gestural units are split (granularity). We report the first repertoire-wide detection of Zipf’s law in ape gesture in one chimpanzee community at a specific level of segmentation and granularity. We suggest that both methodological and socio-ecological factors can shape the detection and expression of Zipf’s law, emphasizing the importance of species-relevant units and metrics for meaningful cross-species comparisons.