8 October 2019, CLC Lab meeting

In the CLC Lab meeting, we will discuss the paper by Coupe et al. (2019; ref below), who report that languages are equally efficient in transmitting information (~39 bits/s), even though some languages are spoken at a higher speed (in syllables/s) than others. (In short: information rates are ~constant, speech rates are not.) The paper got quite some attention: it has been covered in Science, The Atlantic, NewScientist, ScienceDaily, Phys.org and more. Everyone is welcome to join.

Coupé, C., Oh, Y., Dediu, D., & Pellegrino, F. (2019). Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances, 5(9), eaaw2594. https://doi.org/10/gf7jw3