Unlabeled

Speech rate and information per syllable in 17 languages

Japanese speakers read aloud at 482 syllables a minute, with 5.0 bits in each; Thai speakers at 282, with 7.2. Fast or slow, all 17 languages deliver 34 to 46 bits a second, 39 on average.

What does this axis measure?
What does this axis measure?
Speech rate and information per syllable in 17 languages: 17 points, a scatter chart.
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Speech rate (syllables per minute)
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Information per syllable (bits)
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The data: 17 points
Information per syllable (bits)Speech rate (syllables per minute)
4.83452
5.03482
5.29430
5.34423
5.43464
5.47429
5.49424
5.49430
5.56427
5.9352
6.08366
6.53334
6.68413
6.96351
7.09380
7.19282
8.02318
Source
Coupé, Oh, Dediu and Pellegrino (2019), Different languages, similar encoding efficiency, Science Advances 5(9); the authors' data file InfoRateData.csv; speech rates averaged per language and converted to syllables per minute by Unlabeled
Licence
CC BY 4.0 (the authors' data release)
Read
2026-11-09
Drawn
17 points as the puzzle showed them · scatter
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