ArticleScience advances2019
Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche.
Article in Science advances, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed.
- Music Is Quasi-Rhythmic Too: Comparing Bandwidth in Speech and Music Acoustic Modulation Spectra.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- AI Agents Are Coming: 5-Stage Taxonomy of Language-Based AI Systems for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Counseling.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- Animal acoustic communication has a conserved optimal rhythm within the neural delta range.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Neural frequency-tagging of syllables in naturalistic speech is sensitive to background noise and age-related hearing loss.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Cross-Language Study of Oral Diadochokinesis: Rates and Rhythm.Folia phoniatrica et logopaedica : official organ of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) · 2026Article
- Sensorimotor Theta Oscillations Coordinate Speech Movements.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- EEG oscillations and related brain generators of phonation phases in long utterances.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Subword symmetry in natural languages.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Adversarial Dynamics in Centralized Versus Decentralized Intelligent Systems.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Review
- Exploring the dynamics of Shannon's information and iconicity in language processing and lexeme evolution.PloS one · 2025Article
- Refined analysis of the Speech-to-Speech Synchronization task reveals subharmonic synchronization.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux.Science advances · 2024Article
- Dog-human vocal interactions match dogs' sensory-motor tuning.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Speech patterns in responses to questions asked by an intelligent virtual agent can help to distinguish between people with early stage neurodegenerative disorders and healthy controls.Clinical linguistics & phonetics · 2024Article
- An Intrinsically Explainable Method to Decode P300 Waveforms from EEG Signal Plots Based on Convolutional Neural Networks.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Single-Trial Detection and Classification of Event-Related Optical Signals for a Brain-Computer Interface Application.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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