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Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
131–140 of 263 posts
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#132But, 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…
Fluff has value. Fresh cotton candy should be eaten rapidly. It’s fluff. It’s allowed :)
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#133The researchers obviously have to keep the scope narrow in order to get numbers at all. That said, we should be aware that a tech nerd audience will find simple answers to complex non-tech questions appealing, and we should not over-estimate our understanding here just because we have a number. There is a large amount of data transmitted through sub-communication and context, particularly during an in-person interact…
We can avoid reading too much into the study by just remembering the error bars. It's not like 39 is a universal constant. It's more like 39 with a standard deviation of 6. That's a wide spread, but it's less wide than the spread you get from syllable rate alone, and that's all the study quantitatively tells us.
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#134Interesting, I did a similar analysis for music scores before and arrived at 30 bits per second.
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#135But, 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 wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation.
While I'm sure his visual cortex picked up some slack, I'm willing to bet it's mostly just through training. We just aren't trained for faster communication. I've known blind people and they are the same way with their readers.
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exceedingly slow narration, particularly what's normal for audiobooks, is annoying to me because it's slower than I process words. It's like walking with someone whose pace is far slower than your natural gait -- it takes more energy and concentration to slow down. It's why slow-talkers are so annoying. This isn't "how fast can I go through this" but "what is a comfortable pace"? So I bump the speed up, though usuall…
Yes, and the painful slowness becomes even more evident if you speed it up to the 1.25/1.5x range, get comfortable with it, and then go back to 1x. IME, it sounds like the speaker is going over-the-top to enunciate, like you're a small child or have learning disabilities or something.
Audiences vary, and many listeners of audiobooks are visually disabled who may also have hearing problems. Pitching the default to these seems a fair deal, particularly as speeding up is so straightforward.
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#137So 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.…
Side question: I wonder if anyone has actually finished the entire Malazan series. It takes some serious dedication. I would be curious of the story still makes sense to you by the end when listening at that speed.
Not OP, but I am currently on Reaper's Gale.
Malazan quickly became my favourite book series (and I am not even a fan of fantasy). It was hard initially. But it gets better.
However, I think that re-read is a must if you want to fully grasp the whole thing.
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#138Seems reasonable, from what is known about the capacity of speech, although extra cool if there is really some universal number we converge on. Kuyk and Kleijn found the upper bound of the speech channel to be 100 bits per second, in agreement with the lexical rate of about half that in "ON THE INFORMATION RATE OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION" (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7953233) using an interesting method based on mutual information.
Some highlights from the introduction that are relevant:
Broadly speaking, two approaches to measuring the information rate of speech exist: the linguistic approach, and the acoustic approach. The linguistic approach describes speech as a sequence of discrete perceptual units such as phonemes, words, or sentences. Taking the average talking speed as 12 phonemes per second [3], and using the English phoneme probabilities tabulated in [4], the lexical information rate is approximately 50 b/s. When the dependencies of the phonemes are accounted for the rate will be decreased further. The lexical information rate does not include information about talker identification, emotional state, and prosody. However, these variables vary relatively slowly in time and contribute little to the overall information rate. As an example, [5] estimated that the total amount of talker-specific information (e.g., age, accent, sex) was of the order of 30 bits
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#139Earlier 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…
Exceedingly slow narration, particularly what's normal for audiobooks, is annoying to me because it's slower than I process words. It's like walking with someone whose pace is far slower than your natural gait -- it takes more energy and concentration to slow down. It's why slow-talkers are so annoying. This isn't "how fast can I go through this" but "what is a comfortable pace"? So I bump the speed up, though usuall…
As a slow walker I respectfully disagree on the energy to slow down vs speed up! Concentration may be equal however. I get absolutely exhausted keeping up with you fast walkers. :)
Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
#140I once saw research that said English speakers utter about 4 words per second. Shannon once empirically determined each English word carried about 6 bits of information. For what it's worth.