ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Collective problem decomposition improves the wisdom of deliberative crowds.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A simple threshold captures the social learning of conventions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Word embedding for social sciences: an interdisciplinary survey.PeerJ. Computer science · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (for example, time, space, colour, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing about its relation to human communication. We first show that across a sample of ~1,000 languages, there is broad variation in how densely languages encode information into words. Second, we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information. Finally, we trace the relationship between language information density and patterns of communication, showing that informationally denser languages tend towards faster communication but conceptually narrower conversations or expositions within which topics are discussed at greater depth. These results highlight an important source of variation across the human communicative channel, revealing that the structure of language shapes the nature and texture of human engagement, with consequences for human behaviour across levels of society.
Indexed as
Identifiers
38366103What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.