PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Alexandra B. Bosshard AU - Maƫl Leroux AU - Nicholas A. Lester AU - Balthasar Bickel AU - Sabine Stoll AU - Simon W. Townsend TI - From collocations to call-ocations: using linguistic methods to quantify animal call combinations AID - 10.1101/2021.06.16.448679 DP - 2021 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2021.06.16.448679 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/17/2021.06.16.448679.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/17/2021.06.16.448679.full AB - Emerging data in a range of non-human animal species have highlighted a latent ability to combine certain pre-existing calls together into larger structures. Currently, however, there exists no objective quantification of call combinations. This is problematic because animal calls can co-occur with one another simply through chance alone. One common approach applied in language sciences to identify recurrent word combinations is collocation analysis. Through comparing the co-occurrence of two words with how each word combines with other words within a corpus, collocation analysis can highlight above chance, two-word combinations. Here, we demonstrate how this approach can also be applied to non-human animal communication systems by implementing it on a pseudo dataset. We argue collocation analysis represents a promising tool for identifying non-random, communicatively relevant call combinations in animals.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.