The information density of ‘two dudes talking’ or any unscripted format is very low, so it time-compresses well. Specific podcasts, typically scripted monologues with technical content, such as Causality [0] (recommended!), I need to listen to much slower. Ditto if it is in an accent which isn’t mine, which slows my comprehension. I also slow the speed if I’m driving. So, yes, it takes mental overhead, but is doable. Go one click at a time and it will feel natural.
But what you said made me curious. I listened to this podcast at 3x. I was able to understand all the words, but my conceptual understanding decreased. I also have to listen actively -- not passively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SFkwdm0PP0
At 4x, I could only understand the shape of the sentences but could no longer make out the words. But I turned on the captions and found I could keep up. Turns out reading at 4x works, listening at 4x doesn't.
English is also spoken with different prosodies and cadences. For instance, I can understand Singaporean English perfectly, but it's less amenable to being sped up. I tried listening to this lecture in Singaporean English in 3x and found that I could barely understand it.
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" (Adriano Celentano)
Japanese is definitely a faster spoken language than French, but French words tend to be a lot more verbose and packed with meaning. For Japanese speakers to communicate as much meaning as French speakers, they would need to speak faster.
I cannot wait for independent replication!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971274_A_cross-L...
This was also bounded by a reading task, so the performance shown per language could be influenced by the average reading skills of people who speak those languages. They also asked them to pronounce differently than they normally would.
If you take the 17 languages they tested and get the average between them, you get 39bits/s. For English and French, the information rate they recorded was higher, with an average closer to ~45bits/s (just eyeballing their chart). Their results also showed Thai at ~35bits/s. A 10bits/s swing from median to median is pretty huge.
From the paper:
"We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the aforementioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors"
"Together, our findings show that while there is wide interspeaker variation in speech and IRs (information rates), this variation is also structured by language. This means that an individual’s speech behavior is not entirely due to individual characteristics but is further constrained by the language being spoken."
"However, languages seem to stably inhabit an optimal range of IRs, away from the extremes that can still be available to individual speakers. Languages achieve this balance through a trade-off between ID (information density) and SR (syllable rate), resulting in a narrower distribution of IRs compared to SRs. In the introduction, we rhetorically asked whether too low or too high an IR would impede communicative and/or cognitive efficiency. Our results here suggest that the answer to both questions is positive and that human communication seems to avoid two extreme sociolinguistic profiles: on the one hand, high ID languages spoken fast by their speakers (“high-fast”), and, on the other, low ID languages spoken slowly by their speakers (“low-slow”)."
Are simultaneous translator’s brains different? They need to process two languages at once, and I never could do that even though I’m fluent in more than one language.
CamperBob2•3h ago
Guessing there's something very fundamental that the author misunderstands about Morse code.
kevingadd•3h ago
Of course, if you know both ends are computers you can just transmit in some other encoding at a much higher rate.
selcuka•3h ago
Yes, spaces are part of the morse code spec. It looks like a binary encoding but in fact it's ternary.
We can invent a 5-bit (or 6-bit, to include numbers and punctuation) morse-like code to avoid needing spaces.
CamperBob2•2h ago
Historically the metric for Morse code is words per minute. Morse is similar to a Huffman code where common letters are allocated fewer elements, so it's not very meaningful to talk about "bits per second" with respect to Morse even if you do specify the number of words per minute. The number of "bits" will vary based on the letters being transmitted.
Tadpole9181•2h ago
A skilled operator is around 30 WPM. The average English word is 5 (rounded up) characters. Add one character for the space. That's 180 characters per minute, or 3 character per second. With 37 characters available in morse code, that's log_2(37) or 5.2 bits per charater.
So 15.6 bits per second. Just under half of the 39 bits they got for speech, like they said.
Nevermark•1h ago
That wasn't contested.
vvoid•2h ago
The faster the information comes at you, the less important any particular bit is, because you have more context with which to autocorrect.