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The temporal structure of speech rhythms resembles that of the communication signals of numerous animal species. This is shown by a recent study conducted by a research team from the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the University of Regensburg and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Aix-Marseille University. For the study, speech recordings from 48 languages across all inhabited continents were analysed and compared with rhythmic data from animal species such as fish, seals and birds. The aim was to determine whether the rhythm of human speech is unique, and if not, how it fits into a broader biological pattern across species.
The analysis focused on so-called “inter-onset intervals”: contiguous segments of speech including a following pause. This unit is also used in research into animal communication signals, thereby enabling a direct comparison between humans and animals. The data set comprised the Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo), which contains speech recordings from numerous, often under-researched languages, as well as various rhythmic metrics for animals already described in the literature.
The study analysed over 100,000 such intervals and revealed a strikingly similar duration of around 2 seconds across all 48 languages. This consistency held true regardless of language family or the individual characteristics of the speakers. A subsequent comparison with data from research into animal communication revealed that the human speech rhythm falls within the range also described, for example, the Cape fur seal, the brown meagre, or the skylark.
The research team cites physiological factors, such as breathing rhythm, which limits the length of contiguous intervals, as a possible explanation for the observed regularity. Limitations of working memory could also play a role. The results suggest that the fundamental temporal organisation of human communication may stem from mechanisms shared by humans and other animal species.
“When the speech rhythm is calculated in the way it is frequently studied in animal communication, there are significantly fewer differences between the languages examined on this timescale than is the case with smaller linguistic units such as syllables. This suggests that biological factors play an important role here,” says Susanne Fuchs, Senior Researcher at the ZAS Berlin and co-author of the study. Ludger Paschen, co-editor of the DoReCo corpus, adds: “Our study demonstrates how language documentation data from low-resource and endangered languages can be reused to clarify fundamental questions regarding the status of human language.”
The study has been published today in the journal *Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences*.
The study was carried out at the Leibniz Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the University of Regensburg, and IMéRA and ILCB at Aix-Marseille University.
The ZAS is a non-university research institute of the State of Berlin. The centre’s remit is to conduct research into human language ability in general and its manifestation in individual languages. The aim is to gain a better understanding of this central human ability and its biological, cognitive and social factors. The ZAS is a member of the Leibniz Association.
Susanne Fuchs, email: fuchs@leibniz-zas.de
Ludger Paschen, email: ludger.paschen@ur.de
L. S. Burchardt, L. Paschen, and S. Fuchs, “ Rhythm Across Species: Situating Human Speech in a Comparative Framework.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1563, no. 1 (2026): e70383. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.70383
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