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Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

sciencemag.org

41–50 of 263 posts

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#41
This reminds me of The User Illusion. The number "40 bits/s" is quoted as the processing rate of human consciousness.

Maybe humans can only transmit information as fast as they can think of it?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#42
post #26
post #15

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. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc

I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#43
post #19

I'm a bit confused, here. (I went and looked at the original paper.) They estimated information density for each of the subject languages as a whole, on average: > In parallel, from independently available written corpora in these languages, we estimated each language’s information density (ID) as the syllable conditional entropy to take word-internal syllable-bigram dependencies into account. But the experiment uses…

Good question!

I suppose that the experiment wants to capture the actual 'information density' of the language, and hence looks at the full language. Then, they want to avoid any modification in speech rate due to the semantics of the spoken text.

This does not make sense for a hypothesis where the actual bit-rate of speech tends towards 39 b/s. That is, when your text happens to convey more bits, you slow down.

However, for an alternative hypothesis, this design does make sense. The idea here is that a language naturally converges to a speech-rate that gives 39 b/s. The idea here is that the actual speech-rate is much more constant, and just drops until it becomes too fast. For that, I'd argue you don't want the mean bit-rate but something like the 90th percentile bit-rate. Because it seems to me that speech-rate that is 'too fast' more than 10% of the time would not really be natural.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#45
post #14
post #7

Being able to convey emotion with tone in speech likely adds a lot more "information".

The increased information density in tonal language appears to be offset by a reduced speaking rate [0]. [0] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

I think jumelles was referring to something like "don't do that" uttered as fun, angry, etc.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#47
post #38

So here is my own experience. I was avid audio book fan for last 3 years and while ago some guy on reddit told me about how he listen books on Audible using high-speed option like 2.x. I never tried that before last summer since at higher speed speech become incomprehensible for me. What this guy told me is that it's just take time to adjust to it. So I basically started to listen for books at slightly higher speed.…

Blind people use screenreader software sped up so fast as to be indecipherable to untrained ears. The screenreader can give them near instantaneous feedback about where on the screen they are and what's there when it's so sped up, and with a bit of practice perceiving the sped-up speech imposes no burden at all.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#48
post #15

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. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

It depends on the speaker. Some speakers are particularly slow with lots of long pauses and others are faster.

I think anyone can get to 3x but it takes some time to adjust to faster and faster speeds. It also depends on what you are doing while listening. Distractions or listening while doing something else (driving for example) lowers my ability to comprehend. For example on the interstate without much traffic I'll listen to audiobooks at 3x, but in a city or a crowded highway I have to slow it down.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#49
post #15

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. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines.

I just don't get the point. If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. Any content that can be sped up that much without loss is not worth listening to in the first place. You're just skipping the trite cliches, filler, and obvious facts.

I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human speech uses the extremely dense lossy compression method called "A Lifetime of Experience and Biases"

It's only lossy when the decoder's dictionary doesn't have a similar volume of data points to properly reinflate the data stream. Things that didn't make sense to me as a teen make far too much sense now because my experience can properly contextualize the old data.

Or lossy when the decoder has a different volume of data points and extracts totally different information or even info that never existed in the first place. Kinda like those anime/retro game upscaling filters, except with way higher variance on what comes out between decoders, or the same decoder at different times. Gives me an idea for a new JPEG decoder with a floating ADC as input.
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