n-grams while ignoring spaces?

[MarcoP]

Something that isn’t clear to me about the Whale song paper by Arnon et al: they seem to work with pure drops in transitional probabilities, but does this mean that rare symbols are taken to start new segments? For instance, EVA:ag ag is rare, the probability of a transition from a to g is low; would this result in g being usually taken as the start of a new sequence?