phonemes

"We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and even if you have an accent, we can capture that as well," he told the Future Visionaries podcast in 2021.

“The really critical thing about the way that humans use phonemes and sequences of phonemes is that it's very hard to predict what the next one's going to be,” Rendell told Salon during a video interview he conducted onboard a research vessel near the Scottish Isle of Eigg in the North Sea.

According to Rendell, the evidence shows whales are mainly repeating the same phoneme over and over again instead of actually combining varieties of phonemes into complex words.

The study showed how neurons in the brain represent some of the most basic elements involved in constructing spoken words -- from simple speech sounds called phonemes to their assembly into more complex strings such as syllables.

Other neurons reflected more complex aspects of word construction such as the specific assembly of phonemes into syllables.