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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 9, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

Not so fast: Fast speech correlates with lower lexical and structural information.

Uriel Cohen Priva¹

¹Brown University, Box 1821, 190 Thayer St, Providence, RI 02912, United States.

|January 1, 2017

Summary

Speakers adjust speech rate based on information content. Fast speech uses less informative words, suggesting consistent cognitive constraints across individuals despite varying speech speeds.

Keywords:

Information Information rate Language Speech rate

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Speech rate varies dynamically during conversations.
Speech rate adjustments are linked to cognitive and communicative limitations, such as speaking slower for unexpected words.
Individual differences in these limitations are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether speech rate and information content are inversely correlated across speakers.
To determine if cognitive constraints on speech production are relatively constant or vary significantly between individuals.

Main Methods:

Conducted two corpus studies, each replicated on a separate corpus.
Analyzed the correlation between speech rate and word/syntactic informativeness.

Main Results:

Demonstrated a significant inverse correlation: faster speech is associated with less informative words and syntactic structures.
Found that while overall information throughput varies individually, speakers exhibit more similarity in this aspect than their speech rate differences suggest.

Conclusions:

Information-theoretic constraints on speech production are pervasive, operating throughout the language production process.
These constraints suggest a fundamental trade-off between speech speed and information density that is consistent across speakers.