tardy talkers

[Pedroski]

Found this interesting:

 

Researchers have shown: Spanish people speak 7.8 syllables per second, Germans 6.0. Among Asians, Japanese speak 7.8 syllables per second, but Mandarin Chinese only 5.2.

 

Wolfgang Pape, and in 'Die ZEIT from 21.8.14

[ZhangJiang]

Seems that Chinese is "denser" in speech. And I've also found it's "denser" printed.

[Shelley]

Ha from my point of view its because I need more "thinking time before I speak. Very interesting fact, thanks for sharing.

[French]

Spanish always seemed to be a fast spoken language, well, guess it's true.

Thanks for the info.

[陳德聰]

I'm a bit too lazy to look it up right now but didn't the same research find that despite varying rates of syllable production, blocks of meaning were produced at roughly the same speed?

[Silent]

 

Ha from my point of view its because I need more "thinking time before I speak.

I guess this is an important factor too. Maybe they should measure speed in syllables but correct it for information density.

[Pedroski]

This was some research done in Berkeley Ca. in 1985. They did find that Chinese people read only minimally faster than English, or anyway, a language written with letters

 

 

380 English words per minute as opposed to Chinese 390 words. That seems to suggest that, cultural differences notwithstanding, there is a maximum information absorption rate.

[imron]

380 seems a little on the high side for English, and 390 a little on the low side for Chinese.

[Michaelyus]

I believe this is based on this 2011 paper from the Université de Lyon. It's based on a reading a set text, and interestingly Vietnamese was the "base language", set at 1. It was adjusted for Information Density. See the release from ScienceDaily and from the blog "all things linguistic".