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Across-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 87, Number 3, September 2011
- pp. 539-558
- 10.1353/lan.2011.0057
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article is a crosslinguistic investigation of the hypothesis that the average information rate conveyed during speech communication results from a trade-off between average information density and speech rate. The study, based on seven languages, shows a negative correlation between density and rate, indicating the existence of several encoding strategies. However, these strategies do not necessarily lead to a constant information rate. These results are further investigated in relation to the notion of syllabic complexity.