![]() ![]() We suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in the human neurocognitive capacity, probably present in our lineage for a long time ( 4), and that human language can be analyzed as the product of a multiscale communicative and cultural niche construction process involving biology, environment, and culture ( 5).Įach human language provides its speakers with a communication system that fulfills their needs for transmitting information to their peers. This finding, based on quantitative methods applied to a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, highlights the intimate feedback loops between languages and their speakers due to communicative pressures. We show here that the interplay between language-specific structural properties (as reflected by the amount of information per syllable) and speaker-level language processing and production leads languages to gravitate around an information rate (IR) of about 39 bits/s. Despite those differences, Japanese and English endow their respective speakers with linguistic systems that fulfill equally well one of the most important roles of spoken communication, namely, information transmission. ![]() These differences in repertoire size result in large variation in the amount of information they encode per syllable according to Shannon’s theory of communication. For example, linguistic differences between Japanese and English lead to a ratio of 1:11 in their number of distinct syllables. This ubiquity comes with very high levels of variation across the 7000 or so languages ( 3). Language is universally used by all human groups, but it hardly displays undisputable universal characteristics, with a few possible exceptions related to pragmatic and communicative constraints ( 1, 2). Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. ![]() We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. ![]() Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. ![]()
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December 2022
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