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The question arose whether silent reading rates would correlate with oral reading rates across languages.
![kirby s et al (2016) d-place: a global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity kirby s et al (2016) d-place: a global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity](https://www.mdpi.com/entropy/entropy-23-01300/article_deploy/html/images/entropy-23-01300-g001.png)
These results were obtained with subjects reading texts on a computer screen. The more syllables a language needs to express a given amount of information, the higher its syllable rate tends to be. more Recent research on speech rate (Pellegrino et al., 2011) has shown that languages differ in terms of syllable rate, and that these differences are compensated by the average amount of information carried by syllables. Recent research on speech rate (Pellegrino et al., 2011) has shown that languages differ in terms. The results show a significant relationship between the 'consonant-heaviness' of languages and the environmental factors considered, especially tree cover and precipitation. Major world languages, typically spoken across a range of environments, are excluded. Correlations are examined with measures of temperature, precipitation, vegetation, and geomorphology reflecting the mean values for the area in which each language is traditionally spoken.
![kirby s et al (2016) d-place: a global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity kirby s et al (2016) d-place: a global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41-fRGvGABL._SX325_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
Data on segment inventories and syllable structure is taken from LAPSyD, a database on phonological patterns of a large worldwide sample of languages. This paper presents a preliminary test of this hypothesis. Such languages are viewed as " more sonorous ". Specifically, environments in which higher frequencies are less faithfully transmitted (such as denser vegetation or higher ambient temperatures) may favor greater use of sounds characterized by lower frequencies. Several studies posit that part of the variation in sound structure across spoken human languages could likewise reflect adaptation to the local ecological conditions of their use. Moreover, anthropogenic changes in soundscapes have also been shown to generate modifications to the spectral envelope of bird songs. more Bioacousticians have argued that the acoustic effects of differing ecological environments contribute to shaping the acoustic signals used by a variety of species, including within single widely-distributed species. These results are discussed in terms of organization and processing of the mental lexicon.īioacousticians have argued that the acoustic effects of differing ecological environments contri. Language-specific patterns are also present. Shared trends in terms of the mostly employed phonological features are also revealed but a few We observe uneven FL distributions with only a few salient high-FL contrasts. A second analysis consists in a cross-language comparison of the internal FL distribution within vocalic and consonantal subsystems in nine languages. This preference is nevertheless modulated when inflectional morphology and usage frequency were considered. Reflect a strong preference toward consonant-based distinctions rather than vowel-based distinctions in a reduced (lemmatized) configuration of the lexicon. The equal weight of vowels and tones in lexical distinction is confirmed as well as the phenomenon of consonantal bias - advocated in several psycholinguistic studies - in five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Swahili), with various corpus configurations in order to assess the influence of morphology and usage frequency. In a first analysis, we examine the relative contribution of each phonological subsystem to the pool of lexical distinctions and compare the results between two tonal (Cantonese and Mandarin) and seven non-tonal languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Swahili). Quantitatively characterize the relationships between phonological components (segments, stress and tones) by estimating their role at the lexical level.
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more In this paper, we propose a functional and cross-language perspective on the organization of phonological systems based on the notion of functional load (FL). In this paper, we propose a functional and cross-language perspective on the organization of phon.