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Speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second (www.science.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by lvxferre@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

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Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

Interesting excerpt:

De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we're likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That's because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. "It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together."

Ah, here's a link to the paper!

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[–] rbn@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thanks a lot for these insights, much appreciated!

asking a question isn't actually a separate ("?") character. In speech, asking a question is just a modification of tone

But if modification of tone encodes additional information wouldn't we need to consider that as additional bits?

So if 'You need a taxi.' and 'You need a taxi?' are two different things, I don't think we can just skip punctuation when measuring the bits of information in a sentence.

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Yes, exactly. This is information that's encoded by tone, and it is accounted for in the 7 bits per syllable (or lack of syllable, for periods for example). It was more of an example to show how if what you're conveying is assumed to always be speech, the encoding you can use can be much more efficient.

On that note, a thing if forgot to mention is that speech assumes that what will be said is pretty much always valid. For example, sure, ascii has a lot more information density at 8 bits per character as you point out, but in reality it's capable of encoding things like "hsuuia75hs". If you tried communicating this to someone over speech, you'd find that the average speed you can do this drops dramatically from the normal 7 bits/syllable, where the ascii used in my comment's text has been constant-speed. That's one of the trade-offs.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Theoretically speaking you do need to take phrasal tone into account, but in practice the difference is negligible - because most languages reinforce questions through syntactical and/or lexical means - particles, pronouns, subject-verb inversion, etc.

[–] rbn@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'll for sure dig a bit deeper on the links, but for me it's still very counter intuitive to estimate information density of spoken word just by the count of syllables.

E.g. I can vary the sentence 'I need help' in so many ways. I can mumble it to a close sitting person to imply secrecy, I can say it in a desperate voice to show psychological distress, I can increase the volume to indicate urgency etc. And all that doesn't even consider body language, mimics etc. which are all part of the information flow. And I'd guess that body language varies a lot from country to country.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

...ah. The rabbit hole of paralinguistic information - all those bits of info that aren't part of the language itself, but still found alongside it. It's a big deal as you noticed, but really hard to quantify, so I don't blame the authors for leaving it off.

[–] ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But lot of very common ones like Spanish and Portuguese don't. The difference between a statement and a question is exclusively the tone in both.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

That's only for yes/no questions. Open-ended questions start with a pronoun in both, as typical for Indo-European languages. Portuguese example:

A cor do cavalo é cinza. // the colour of-the horse is grey.
Qual é a cor do cavalo? // which is the colour of-the horse?
Qual que é a cor do cavalo? // which that/what is the colour of-the horse?

#2 is the standard way to phrase a question, but #3 is really common in informal speech.

And colloquially sometimes you even see yes/no questions getting some "random" emphatic word, like:

A cor do cavalo é cinza, né? // the colour of-the horse is grey, innit?
Ma[s] a cor do cavalo é cinza? // but the colour of-the horse is grey?

They do change the nature of the question slightly (the first one sounds rhetoric, the second one as if there was conflicting info), but the main reason they're added is to reinforce the phrasal tone as a question marker.