While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages evolve and are used. Assuming that the capacity to process information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the 600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration trade-off in operation, both across and within the world's languages.
翻译：虽然存在着数十种自然语言,每个语言都有其独特的特点和独特性,但它们都有一个共同的主题:促进人类交流。因此,我们可以合理地预测人类认知决定了这些语言的演变和使用。假设处理信息的能力在人类人口中大致保持不变,我们期望在各种语言之间和语言内部产生超常-长期的交换。我们使用600种语言来分析这一权衡,在控制了几种潜在的混乱之后,我们在两种环境中都发现了有力的支持证据。具体地说,我们发现,在通常情况下,用不那么令人惊讶的语言和反之,用更快的语言制作的电话。此外,我们确认,在600种语言中,用319种语言平均而言,用更令人惊讶的电话更长。因此,我们得出结论,有确凿证据表明,在世界上不同语言之间和内部都存在超常-长期的交换。
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