Apparently, they're is a time article about it http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0

Apparently, they're is a time article about it http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0... They talk about information density: With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1. For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information. Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%2520appear_language.pdf http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...