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Language speed versus efficiency: Is faster better?
September 1, 2011, Linguistic Society of America
A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information. The study, "A cross-linguistic perspective on speech information rate," to be published in the September 2011 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is co-authored by Francois Pellegrino, Christophe Coupe, and Egidio Marsico.
As Dr. Pellegrino notes, "this result illustrates that several encoding strategies are possible. For instance, Spanish is characterized by a fast rate of low-information syllables, while Mandarin exhibits a slower syllabic rate with more informative syllables. In the end, their information rates are very similar (differing only by four percent)." Furthermore, Dr. Pellegrino concluded, "we discovered a strong relationship between the information density of the syllables and the complexity of their linguistic structure." Pellegrino and colleagues' result confirms the existence of distinct linguistic ways of packing information into syllables which eventually interact with the actual speech rate to result in a tendency toward a uniform information rate.
The origin of the speech regulation remains unclear and the team explores several hypotheses in the article involving cognitive or social factors for potential follow-on research. Whether this variation involves cognitive or social factors, it also affirms our appreciation for the richness of languages and their power of expression across different cultures and peoples.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2011-09-language-efficiency-faster.html#jCp
September 1, 2011, Linguistic Society of America
A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information. The study, "A cross-linguistic perspective on speech information rate," to be published in the September 2011 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is co-authored by Francois Pellegrino, Christophe Coupe, and Egidio Marsico.
As Dr. Pellegrino notes, "this result illustrates that several encoding strategies are possible. For instance, Spanish is characterized by a fast rate of low-information syllables, while Mandarin exhibits a slower syllabic rate with more informative syllables. In the end, their information rates are very similar (differing only by four percent)." Furthermore, Dr. Pellegrino concluded, "we discovered a strong relationship between the information density of the syllables and the complexity of their linguistic structure." Pellegrino and colleagues' result confirms the existence of distinct linguistic ways of packing information into syllables which eventually interact with the actual speech rate to result in a tendency toward a uniform information rate.
The origin of the speech regulation remains unclear and the team explores several hypotheses in the article involving cognitive or social factors for potential follow-on research. Whether this variation involves cognitive or social factors, it also affirms our appreciation for the richness of languages and their power of expression across different cultures and peoples.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2011-09-language-efficiency-faster.html#jCp