Different Languages, Similar Encoding Efficiency: Comparable Information Rates Across the Human Communicative Niche
By Christophe Coupé, Yoon Mi Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino
10 pagesWe show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between information per syllable and speech rate properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually.