That’s why the researchers used

> … a new open-source computational tool called ZLAvian, which compares real-world observed patterns to simulated ones to determine if ZLA is present.

I'm not doubting that the finding is there, I'm expressing scepticism that it means very much. If you randomly sample uniformly from the set {"a", "b", " "} repeatedly, the "word "ab" will appear much more often than the "word", "aaaaaabbbbababa". Doesn't say very much about language itself though.

You got me interested in the question, and one of the first things I found out is that there is Zipf’s Law, and then there is Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation.

Monkeys-randomly-typing is one of many processes which will indeed generate sequences conforming to the former, and it is perhaps the exceptions which are most interesting.

The latter law observes that the former generally applies to sequences generated for communication, having semantics and usually a grammar. While this may be the expected finding, there is value in having this expectation empirically verified.

Interesting comment since this is from the university of Manchester. Is this a late return to monkey news?