Study suggests information is conveyed at the same rate no matter what the talking speed is

[vellavu]

Fast or slow talker, in the end it's all the same. Study suggests information is conveyed at the same rate

American researchers from Brown University have made an interesting discovery: whether people speak fast or slow, they generally convey information (meaning) at the same rate. It seems counterintuitive but if you pay close attention to conversations you might reach the same conclusion.

“It seems the constraints on how much information per second we should transmit are fairly strict, or stricter than we thought they were,” said Uriel Cohen Priva, author of the study in the March issue of Cognition and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

What Priva and colleagues suggest is that there’s a narrow channel of communication data that we can tap into when we’re trying to converse. This channel ensures that we do not provide too much or too little information at a given time. There’s a pattern to how fast and slow talkers convey information. The fast talker tends to use common words and simple syntax while the slow speaker tends to use rarer words and more complicated wordings.

 

[ILLYRIAN]

What a load of bull, if you have to lip read, them fast talkers tend to get ignored.

 

[Bluebird]

I talk fast but that's unique to my accent, not me. I'm not aware of using simpler words to compensate, but then like I say, it's an accent thing rather than the way I speak.

 

[Last Watcher]

I tend to talk slowly, it bugs the hell out of the missus sometimes, but I find that if I try to talk faster I tend to mispronounce my words, or
even miss words out altogether.....so it becomes jibberish.
Not aware of using words that convey more complicated meaning....If I tried to think of some I would probably end up talking even slower....
then I would have to keep waking the person I was talking to up every so often.......😳

 

[Fuffy]

I don't think that information would be gathered at the same rate if you were getting it from someone who talks like Ozzy Osbourne (who speaks gibberish unless he is singing or yelling his wife's name).

 

[Athena]

I tend to speak fast if I'm excited or nervous, and normally that's when my brain fails to compute and leaves me tongue tied for words..... so yeah, common words and simple syntax. Listen to the podcast, it's full of it. 😀