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Second-Language French, Spanish, and English All Exhibit Low Information Rate Relative to First-Language Speech

Listening to even highly intelligible foreign-accented speech can be slow and effortful. This research proposes that the extra effort required for L2 speech understanding is related to its suboptimal information transmission profile. Specifically, slow speech rate (i.e. few syllables/second) combines with low information density (i.e. more syllables for a given text/meaning) to yield very low information rate (i.e. less information conveyed/second) for L2 versus L1 speech. Based on L1 and L2 recordings of a standard text, we show that L2 English, L2 French and L2 Spanish all exhibit slower speech rates and lower information densities than their L1 counterparts. Lower information density for L2 speech results from substantial syllable reduction in L1 speech (all languages) in contrast to either no reduction (Spanish) or syllable epenthesis (English and French) in L2 speech. Thus, across languages, L2 speech involves slow and information sparse syllables leading to sub-optimal information transmission to the listener.