Linguistics

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

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days 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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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 3 days 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.