人类语言信息传递速率的共性——基于61种语言大规模语料库的计算  

The commonality of the information transmission rate of human language:A calculation based on large-scale corpora of 61 languages

作　　者：孔超 刘娟 KONG Chao;LIU Juan(School of Literature,Shandong University,Ji'nan 250100,China)

机构地区：[1]山东大学文学院语言科学实验中心,山东省济南市250100

出　　处：《外语教学与研究》2022年第3期362-374,479,共14页Foreign Language Teaching and Research

摘　　要：人类语言在形式上纷繁多样,但作为信息传递工具,不同语言都使用发音–听觉信道完成信息传递。本文对覆盖49.8亿人口的61种语言的大规模语音、文本语料库数据进行了计算研究,以探讨不同语言信息传递的速率和策略。计算结果发现人类语言信息传递的速率和策略具有很强的共性:61种不同语言中,语言传递信息的速率都分布在14比特每秒左右,同时在词这一级单位上,不同语言有非常一致的信息密度(约6.8比特每词)和平均语速(约2词每秒),这意味着在词这一级单位上不同语言使用了完全一致的编码策略和信息速率。而不同语言在信息编码问题上的多样性主要体现在音节这一层级上。Human languages are diverse in form,but as an information transmission tool,all languages use vocal-auditory channels to complete information transmission.This paper conducts a computational study of large-scale speech and text corpora of 61 languages spoken altogether by a population of 4.98 billion to explore the rates and strategies of information transmission in different languages.The results show that the rates and strategies of human language information transmission have a strong commonality:Among the 61 languages,the information transmission rate is around 14 bits/s,and at the word level,different languages have very consistent information densities(≈6.8 bits/word) and average speech rates(≈2 words/s),which indicates that different languages use the same coding strategy and information rate at the word level.The diversity of information coding in languages mainly appears at the syllable level.

关 键 词：语言共性 言语交际 信息速率 信息编码 

分 类 号：H087[语言文字—语言学]