- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Interesting excerpt:
De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. “It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.”
I’ll for sure dig a bit deeper on the links, but for me it’s still very counter intuitive to estimate information density of spoken word just by the count of syllables.
E.g. I can vary the sentence ‘I need help’ in so many ways. I can mumble it to a close sitting person to imply secrecy, I can say it in a desperate voice to show psychological distress, I can increase the volume to indicate urgency etc. And all that doesn’t even consider body language, mimics etc. which are all part of the information flow. And I’d guess that body language varies a lot from country to country.
…ah. The rabbit hole of paralinguistic information - all those bits of info that aren’t part of the language itself, but still found alongside it. It’s a big deal as you noticed, but really hard to quantify, so I don’t blame the authors for leaving it off.