languages with lower information density are spoken at a higher syllables/second rate and vice versa apparently every language achieves a similar rate > 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.   /sciadv.aaw2594
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