NEW YORK(Dispatches)-Fast talkers tend to convey less information with each word and syntactic structure than slower-paced speakers, meaning that no matter our pace, we all say just about as much in a given time, a new study finds.
The study suggests we tend to converse within a narrow channel of communication data so that we do not provide too much or too little information at a given time, 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.
"It seems the constraints on how much information per second we should transmit are fairly strict, or stricter than we thought they were," Cohen Priva said.
In information theory, rarer word choices convey greater "lexical information," while more complicated syntax, such as the passive voice, conveys greater "structural information." To stay within the channel, those who talk quickly speak with more common words and simpler syntax, while those with a slower pace tend to use rarer, more unexpected words and more complicated wordings, Cohen Priva found.