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keruiduo / SupplMatInfoRate

Supplementary materials for the scientific article "The bio-cultural niche of language is optimised for information transmission"
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Data for Sign Language is missing #2

Open binarykitchen opened 5 years ago

binarykitchen commented 5 years ago

Just indulged with great interest https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second and arrived here.

Deaf here and extremely curious what the bitrate would be for Sign Language. We always have been bragged that our language is three dimensional and transfers more "data" but is that really true? Need evidence.

ddediu commented 5 years ago

Hi Michael, this is indeed a great question -- there's right now a discussion going on Twitter and, with some luck, we might be able to organize a project to empirically look at this :) Best, Dan

binarykitchen commented 5 years ago

Great. Can you send me some link where I can follow the latest status on this? Really very, very excited to see a honest comparison between spoken and signed languages.

ddediu commented 5 years ago

The twitter thread actually ended in a discussion with some sign language/multimodal researchers that now moved offline -- I hope that will result in a project looking into it as it is far from obvious (a) what a "unit" comparable to the syllable s for sign language and (b) how to measure something like "speech rate" given the parallel, 3D and multichannel nature of sign... But hopefully we'll get somewhere :)

binarykitchen commented 5 years ago

Understand it's offline now. Out of curiousness, can I see the link to that Twitter thread?

Indeed it is far from obvious, very hard to compare. I do have connections with Sign Language linguistics who have "touched" and "questioned" this issue before. Let me know if you would like their contact.