Peer-reviewed research
A cross-language perspective on speech information rate
François Pellegrino et al., Language (Linguistic Society of America), vol. 87, no. 3, 2011
Read the originalRead on October 17, 2026
- What it is
- A cross-language study that recorded the same short passages, translated into British English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, and measured each speaker's rate in syllables per second and the density of information per syllable.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed in the journal Language. The copy we read is the author's accepted draft from May 2011, so page numbers and table layout may differ from the published version. The sample covers seven languages, and each passage is only five sentences long, so the rates describe read speech in one kind of text.
Facts taken from this source
- In the same 2011 study, English speakers averaged 6.19 syllables per second when reading the translated texts aloud at a normal rate.
“English 0.91 (± 0.04) 6.19 (± 0.16) 1.08 (± 0.08)” (Table 1, English row)
- In a 2011 study that had speakers read translated texts aloud at a normal rate, Japanese speakers averaged 7.84 syllables per second, the fastest of the seven languages measured.
“Japanese 0.49 (± 0.02) 7.84 (± 0.09) 0.74 (± 0.06)” (Table 1, Japanese row)
- The study's authors quote Roach (1999) that a language with simple syllables such as Japanese can fit more syllables into a second than English or Polish, so it will probably sound faster.
“So if a language with a relatively simple syllable structure like Japanese is able to fit more syllables into a second than a language with a complex syllable structure such as English or Polish, it will probably sound faster as a result” (Section 3.3, Variation in speech rate)