It’s no surprise that English sounds different than Japanese. Different characters, syllables and grammatical rules are just the tip of the iceberg for what sets these languages apart. But there is one commonality between the two: The amount of information a native speaker will convey in a given amount of time is almost exactly the same.
In a report published today in Science Advances, researchers found that, across 17 different languages, roughly the same amount of information was passed along every second while speaking.
The study addresses a gap in understanding how quickly we make meaning from language, a rate of information that is “almost totally unknown, despite its critical importance for understanding human spoken communication,” the authors write.
Researchers gave 170 native adult speakers of various tongues 15 texts to read in their native language. The passages were semantically similar, so subjects were digesting the same kind of information ...
