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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

#121

Post by microcolonel »

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…

Depends on the natural speed of the speaker, but I listen to most podcasts and YouTube commentary/narrative at 2x. Podcasts sometimes in the 3x range.

Sometimes it's worth slowing down to 1.5x to give myself a bit of time to process the ideas, though slowing below that sometimes hurts comprehension.

Side note: I find that YouTube in Chrome has the best pitch-preserving time stretching filter, and I've neglected all this time to figure out what exactly they use to accomplish that. I'd love to add that to mpv, if it's not already there.

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

#122

Post by microcolonel »

jacobolus wrote: post #82
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…

People tend to enjoy genre fiction because it is full of predictable filler. Not all entertainment has to be surprising or life changing. Just spending time in the moment with an enjoyable story is not wasting it.

I think this really is a case of to each his own. Pure fiction with drawn out descriptions and excess vocabulary drives me to anger.

I think I have a similar thing visually, where above a certain text size, I have a very hard time reading. The optimal text size for me is pretty small, even on a standard resolution display.

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

#123

Post by dexterdog »

saagarjha wrote: post #80
markussss wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. I go anywhere from 2.1 to 2.5 based on the podcast.

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

#124

Post by kccqzy »

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…

It's easy to train yourself to do that though. Just find your favorite audiobook and listen to it daily. First listen to it at 1.5x, then adjust to 2x after a few days, then 2.5x after a few more days etc. You'd be surprised how fast your brain can actually process the information.

Personally when I did this I feel irritated when I speak because my sped-up audiobooks have conditioned me into thinking I should be speaking at that rate, but it's just not possible for my mouth and tongue to move that fast physically.

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

#125

Post by shorts_theory »

dredmorbius wrote: post #91
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…

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…

That's interesting. If you're talking about Hello Internet, I enjoy listening to them at 1x. I find it quite relaxing to listen to passively.

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

#126

Post by n1231231231234 »

godelski wrote: post #109
n1231231231234 wrote: post #75

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.…

Why did everyone assume it would be the same on average? This seems weird to me. Also, can you explain more about how the information density was calculated? Anything at the bit level seems crazy small to me. Words convey a lot of information. They cause your brain to create images, sounds, emotions, smells, etc. I guess we're calling language a compression of that? But even still, bits seems small.

> Why did everyone assume it would be the same on average? This seems weird to me.

(see edit below; but i leave this up; it might be interesting, also) you mean that even for smaller sequences, the UID holds, right? the assumption was that even for a single sentence, there are a lot of ways to reduce or increase information density so that you get a smoother signal. e.g.: "It is clear that we have to help them to move on.", you could contract it to "it's clear we gotta help them move on" and contract it even further in the actual speech signal ('help'em'). or you could stretch it: "it is clear to us that we definitely have to help them in some way to move on", or alike. the assumption was that such increases / decreases would even be done to 'iron out' the very local peaks and troughs, particularly in speech.

bits: yeah, that took me a while to get used to, as well. the authors used (conditional) entropy as a way to measure information density (which is a good measure in this instance imv). and bits is just per definition the unit that comes out of information theoretical entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) . btw: while technically possible, i don't think that the comparison in the summary article between 39 bits in language and a xy bit modem is a helpful comparison. bits in the context of entropy are all about occurence and expectation in a given context. bits of a modem/in CS, they represent a low level information content for which we do not check context and expectation.

edit: ah, i realise you are asking why most in our community assumed that this universal rate applied across languages, right?

i guess the intuition was that all of us humans, no matter what language we speak, use the speech signal to transmit and receive information and that all of us have the same cognitive abilities. so the rate at which we convey information should be about the same. sure, there are probably differences according to some factors (spoken vs written language, differences in knowledge between speakers, etc.). but when the only factor that differs is English vs Hausa, esp. in spontaneous spoken language, then the information rate should be about the same.

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

#127

Post by canjobear »

tkfu wrote: 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…

Information depends on probability. If something is very probable then it doesn’t have much information (because you already saw it coming). If something is improbable then it has a lot of information.

In the paper they want to know how much information is in a syllable in context. To do that they need to know the probability of each syllable given the previous syllable. To estimate that probability distribution, you need to look at a lot of text, much more than just the passages that the authors used to measure speech rate.

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

#128

Post by ShinyObject »

The 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 interaction, which is what people are wired for. Overall tone, body language, eye contact, and various social cues make up the bulk of data being transferred in many interactions. There's a reason why talking to some people feels exhausting and others invigorating, and it's not just the transcript.

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

#129

Post by Iv »

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…

That quote seems to imply that they have not measured the maximum speed to receive information but the speed at which we are comfortable outputing it.

There is no shortage of people training to receive a lot of information at once, and 39 bits per second seems to me on the lower end of what some video games require but in terms of constructed, linguistic output? They may be on to something there.

Fast chatters are not faster thinkers. I have yet to see people exchanging thought at a higher rate then usual.

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

#130

Post by d-sc »

ShinyObject wrote: post #128

The 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…

What are the things that make the difference between invigorating and exhausting?
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