Maybe not just spoken language. I would suggest sign language has a similar bit rate as spoken. The evidence is that a sign interpreter conveys about the same information in a conversation in the same time.
I've always found this interesting. Think+transmit seems more likely to be the bottleneck vs receive, given that we can easily parse most podcasts etc at 3-4X speed. If being understood by everyone wasn't required, I wonder if one could learn to boost both send and receive rates?
This definitely fits with my experience as a language learner studying French and Japanese.
Japanese is definitely a faster spoken language than French, but French words tend to be a lot more verbose and packed with meaning. For Japanese speakers to communicate as much meaning as French speakers, they would need to speak faster.
The bits are defined in another paper by the authors using "syntagmatic density of information ratio (SDIR)" which seems to be related to the number of syllables required to convey the same information in different languages, using Vietnamese as the baseline.
The paper does not seem to support that human speech has a universal transmission rate or that every spoken language has a universal information rate. They showed that information rate varied by individual and by language, just that it varied less than the syllable rate.
This was also bounded by a reading task, so the performance shown per language could be influenced by the average reading skills of people who speak those languages. They also asked them to pronounce differently than they normally would.
If you take the 17 languages they tested and get the average between them, you get 39bits/s. For English and French, the information rate they recorded was higher, with an average closer to ~45bits/s (just eyeballing their chart). Their results also showed Thai at ~35bits/s. A 10bits/s swing from median to median is pretty huge.
From the paper:
"We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the aforementioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors"
"Together, our findings show that while there is wide interspeaker variation in speech and IRs (information rates), this variation is also structured by language. This means that an individual’s speech behavior is not entirely due to individual characteristics but is further constrained by the language being spoken."
"However, languages seem to stably inhabit an optimal range of IRs, away from the extremes that can still be available to individual speakers. Languages achieve this balance through a trade-off between ID (information density) and SR (syllable rate), resulting in a narrower distribution of IRs compared to SRs. In the introduction, we rhetorically asked whether too low or too high an IR would impede communicative and/or cognitive efficiency. Our results here suggest that the answer to both questions is positive and that human communication seems to avoid two extreme sociolinguistic profiles: on the one hand, high ID languages spoken fast by their speakers (“high-fast”), and, on the other, low ID languages spoken slowly by their speakers (“low-slow”)."
Maybe more interesting: what’s the average reading speed per language, and what’s the variation? I know that reading speed varies a lot ( also depends on topic, a math textbook reads slower than an Ian Fleming book).
Are simultaneous translator’s brains different? They need to process two languages at once, and I never could do that even though I’m fluent in more than one language.
I wonder, does this account for compression? Are the bits counting a concrete representation of ideas transmitted? Or are bits counting a simple abstraction over syllables, similar to a token? Language is compression. And while humans may transmit at a universal rate, maybe some languages/cultures have a more dense compression of ideas than others? Like in Turkish, how there's a word for "moonlight on the water" https://ihearthesamewinds.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/142/.
its not the language that communicated its the people. You recruit mediocres in different languages they all communicated in the same mid , 39 bits or whatever. Let two geniuses have a chat or even two teenagers - its a different ball game than 39 bits
I have always wondered if transmission bitrate remains the same for the same language, spoken at seemingly different speeds.
There is that stereotype that french-speaking Swiss people speak slower than French ones. In my experience I find it valid, but maybe I am wrong.
If this is accurate, I am wondering if Swiss people transmit information at the same rate as French people.
It could be that they use more precise words on average, that convey more information, even if spoken more slowly, and keeping transmission rate identical. Or that body language, intonations are richer (non verbal).
Or the spoken transmission rate may actually be slower, but as the article describes, bottleneck is about structuring the ideas, and Swiss speakers, on average, may be more efficient/deliberate at that, instinctively/culturally.
I don't have enough experience speaking with Swiss nationals to verify my anecdotal theories... if anyone can chime in...
this study has a grand total sample size of 170 (that's 10 speakers per language), it also measures syllable rate (i.e. syllables/second times diversity of syllables) as a proxy for information. this is pretty far from how people will intuitively conceptualize "information".
20 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 25.5 ms ] threadGuessing there's something very fundamental that the author misunderstands about Morse code.
Japanese is definitely a faster spoken language than French, but French words tend to be a lot more verbose and packed with meaning. For Japanese speakers to communicate as much meaning as French speakers, they would need to speak faster.
I cannot wait for independent replication!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971274_A_cross-L...
This was also bounded by a reading task, so the performance shown per language could be influenced by the average reading skills of people who speak those languages. They also asked them to pronounce differently than they normally would.
If you take the 17 languages they tested and get the average between them, you get 39bits/s. For English and French, the information rate they recorded was higher, with an average closer to ~45bits/s (just eyeballing their chart). Their results also showed Thai at ~35bits/s. A 10bits/s swing from median to median is pretty huge.
From the paper:
"We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the aforementioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors"
"Together, our findings show that while there is wide interspeaker variation in speech and IRs (information rates), this variation is also structured by language. This means that an individual’s speech behavior is not entirely due to individual characteristics but is further constrained by the language being spoken."
"However, languages seem to stably inhabit an optimal range of IRs, away from the extremes that can still be available to individual speakers. Languages achieve this balance through a trade-off between ID (information density) and SR (syllable rate), resulting in a narrower distribution of IRs compared to SRs. In the introduction, we rhetorically asked whether too low or too high an IR would impede communicative and/or cognitive efficiency. Our results here suggest that the answer to both questions is positive and that human communication seems to avoid two extreme sociolinguistic profiles: on the one hand, high ID languages spoken fast by their speakers (“high-fast”), and, on the other, low ID languages spoken slowly by their speakers (“low-slow”)."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
Are simultaneous translator’s brains different? They need to process two languages at once, and I never could do that even though I’m fluent in more than one language.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20880789
There is that stereotype that french-speaking Swiss people speak slower than French ones. In my experience I find it valid, but maybe I am wrong.
If this is accurate, I am wondering if Swiss people transmit information at the same rate as French people.
It could be that they use more precise words on average, that convey more information, even if spoken more slowly, and keeping transmission rate identical. Or that body language, intonations are richer (non verbal).
Or the spoken transmission rate may actually be slower, but as the article describes, bottleneck is about structuring the ideas, and Swiss speakers, on average, may be more efficient/deliberate at that, instinctively/culturally.
I don't have enough experience speaking with Swiss nationals to verify my anecdotal theories... if anyone can chime in...
i would take the results too seriously.