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

sciencemag.org

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

#71

Post by dfhdshfff »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: 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…

I used to watch a lot of lectures at a high speed. But I've came to realize that the faster I watch something, the faster I forget it.

It is like the infromation doesn't have the time to settle in my memory, despite me understanding it.

It's maybe because when things are slow, I can use the dead time to think about the implication/corner cases of what's being said.

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

#72

Post by liability »

the_af wrote: post #29
jefftk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is Being "verbose" means that each letter you type communicates fewer bits of information. If the bottleneck is putting ideas together then you would expect someone writing in a more verbose language to type more letters per minute but still take a similar amount of time to communicate the idea. In practice most Java p…

Like the sibling comment mentioned, it seems verbosity hinders reading comprehension rather than writing. Many IDEs understand this and hide some of the boilerplate. This raises the question: if the IDE autocompletes the boilerplate for you, and also hides it, why is it needed in the first place?

Consider the verbosity of XML compared to s-expressions. ... vs (html ...)

The latter can trivially be used to output the former. The conclusion is obvious; some of these formats are objectively more verbose that others while having equivalent expressive power.

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

#73

Post by zik »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: 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…

Maybe "speed readers" still receive knowledge at around 39bps - they just filter out a lot more.

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

#74

Post by Causality1 »

SXX wrote: 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.…

Why would you want to do that though? Isn't the experience of listening to it the point? If not, why listen to it at all instead of reading a detailed summary?

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

#75

Post by n1231231231234 »

This is really cool. I am working in a related area and I think most of us have assumed that on average, the information rate is 'about the same' for the languages across the world. So it's exciting to see that their results confirm this assumption.

Two qualifying remarks.

1) The 'about the same' is important. Even in their data, there is still quite some variance. They found an average of 39bits, with a stdev of 5. That means that about 1/3 of the data falls outside of the range of 34-44bits.

2) Which brings me to the the uniform information density (UID) hypothesis. According to the UID, the language signal should be pretty smooth wrt how information is spread across it. For many years, the UID was thought to be pretty absolute: Even across a unit like a sentence, it was thought that information will spread pretty evenly. Now, there is an increasing amount of research that shows that esp. in spontaneous spoken language, there is a lot more variance within in the signal, with considerable peaks and troughs spread across longer sequences.

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

#76

Post by SopaDeMacaco »

_nhynes wrote: post #14
jumelles wrote: 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_...

That's not what he said, sperglord.

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

#77

Post by liability »

JimBrimble35 wrote: post #24

I would love to see the impact of acronyms on information density. It would also be interesting to see how many bits per second the average human maximum is.

Some people you might expect to have a very high bps, like auctioneers, are actually using a sort of parlor trick to create the illusion of rapid speech (a form of intention skillful stuttering which, when done right, is perceived as very fast speech.)

I expect some people are capable of some small multiple of this average, but probably not anything seriously dramatic.

(Of course there seems to be no lower bound, as in the case of involuntary stuttering.)

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

#78

Post by rimliu »

SXX wrote: post #66
bitwize wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can tell from experience that when I lay down in my bed with my eyes closed I could comprehend speech at much higher speed than I would while walking on the street. No surprise blind people can handle it better even though I have no clue how exactly it work in relations to the brain. I was always curios to make actual research / paper on this kind of thing, but as non-scientist I simply have no time to do so. So I…

Ever had to turn the radio/music in your car off in some tricky situations?

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

#79

Post by markussss »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: 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…

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while doing other things; walking, cleaning, cooking, traveling, playing games, etc. Every time I try speeding up, even just to 1.25x, I don't enjoy it as much, as it feels rushed and stressful. I think it could be interesting to learn to listen and read at extremely high speeds, but nothing more than interesting, and I'm even doubting the usefulness of it.

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

#80

Post by saagarjha »

markussss wrote: post #79
knzhou wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while doing other things; walking, cleaning, cooking, traveling, playing games, etc. Every time I try speeding up, even just to 1.25x, I don't enjoy it as much, as it feels rushed and stressful. I think it could be interesting to learn to listen and read at extremely high speeds, but nothing more than interesting, and I'm even doubting the usefulness of it.

On the flip side, I listen to podcasts at 2x and now the hosts' voices sound weird when I hear them at 1x elsewhere.
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