Across-language perspective on speech information rate

Abstract

This article is a crosslinguistic investigation of the hypothesis that the average information rate conveyed during speech communication results from a trade-off between average information density and speech rate. The study, based on seven languages, shows a negative correlation between density and rate, indicating the existence of several encoding strategies. However, these strategies do not necessarily lead to a constant information rate. These results are further investigated in relation to the notion of syllabic complexity.