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Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche.
Christophe Coupé1,2, Yoon Mi Oh3,4, Dan Dediu1,5
1Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR5596, CNRS, University of Lyon, 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, France.
Natural languages efficiently transmit information, with speech rate and information per syllable balancing to maintain a consistent information rate across diverse languages. This highlights the interplay between linguistic structure and human cognition.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Information Theory
- Evolutionary Biology
Background:
- Natural languages exhibit significant cross-linguistic variation in structural properties, such as syllable count.
- This variation leads to differences in Shannon information per syllable across languages.
- Despite variations, all languages efficiently encode and transmit information.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between language-level information per syllable and speaker-level speech rate.
- To determine if information transmission rates are universal across languages.
- To explore the interplay of linguistic structure, neurocognition, and biological factors in language evolution.
Main Methods:
- Quantitative analysis of a large cross-linguistic corpus.
- Inclusion of data from 17 diverse languages.
- Measurement of information per syllable and speech rate.
Main Results:
- Languages exhibit wide variation in Shannon information per syllable and speech rate individually.
- A strong coupling exists between information per syllable and speech rate across languages.
- Despite individual variations, languages maintain a remarkably similar information transmission rate of approximately 39 bits/s.
Conclusions:
- Information transmission rate is a more universal characteristic of language than individual components like information per syllable or speech rate.
- Findings suggest feedback loops between language structure, speaker neurocognition, and biology under communicative pressures.
- Language emerges as a product of multiscale communicative niche construction involving biology, environment, and culture.
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