Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche - PMC
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Sci Adv<br>. 2019 Sep 4;5(9):eaaw2594. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche
Christophe Coupé<br>Christophe Coupé
1Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR5596, CNRS, University of Lyon, 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, France.
2Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong.
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1,2,*, Yoon Mi Oh<br>Yoon Mi Oh
3New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand.
4Department of French Language and Literature, Ajou University, Suwon, 16499 Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
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3,4,*, Dan Dediu<br>Dan Dediu
1Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR5596, CNRS, University of Lyon, 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, France.
5Collegium de Lyon, University of Lyon, 24 rue Baldassini, 69007 Lyon, France.
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1,5, François Pellegrino<br>François Pellegrino
1Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR5596, CNRS, University of Lyon, 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, France.
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1,†
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1Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR5596, CNRS, University of Lyon, 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, France.
2Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong.
3New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand.
4Department of French Language and Literature, Ajou University, Suwon, 16499 Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
5Collegium de Lyon, University of Lyon, 24 rue Baldassini, 69007 Lyon, France.
*These authors contributed equally to this work.
†Corresponding author. Email: francois.pellegrino@univ-lyon2.fr
Received 2018 Dec 21; Accepted 2019 Aug 2; Collection date 2019 Sep.
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
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PMCID: PMC6984970 PMID: 32047854
Human languages encode similar average information rates (~39 bits/s) despite their remarkable differences.
Abstract
Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.
INTRODUCTION
Language is universally used by all human groups, but it hardly displays undisputable universal characteristics, with a few possible exceptions related to pragmatic and communicative constraints (1, 2). This ubiquity comes with very high levels of variation across the 7000 or so languages (3). For example, linguistic differences between Japanese and English lead to a ratio of 1:11 in...