The NYTimes decided to report on the extent to which Hungarians are better than Americans at recalling store prices. Given that most blogging I do about Hungary seems to result in a discussion of the Hungarian language and given that the authors explain the findings based on language differences, I thought I’d take this opportunity to address the issue head on.
Let’s start with the findings:
Hungarians are far better than Americans at recalling long prices; on average, they can recall 19 to 24 syllables with decent accuracy, while Americans can recall only 13. The authors suggested that this was because Hungarians speak 41 percent faster, both out loud and when repeating sounds to themselves “subvocally.”
The NYTimes piece ends right there. That’s not fair, the author left out the most interesting part: how do we know how fast Hungarians speak in comparison to Americans?
First, let’s set aside the question of who these “Hungarians” and “Americans” are based on the study. * (I actually tend to care about these things, but I don’t want to derail the speech speed mystery.)
I looked up the article [subscription required] upon which the NYTimes blurb was based. It appears in the September issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. After presenting the findings, the authors suggest the following:
One possibility is that Hungarians speak faster. Research on the memory span across different languages has suggested that languages that use more syllables on average per word tend to be spoken at a faster rate, possibly to attain “an optimum rate of information flow … to suit the human capacity for message transmission and reception” (Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres 1986, 749). Because we did not find any published work on speech rate or language “length” that included Hungarian participants, we compared the pronunciation speed between Hungarian and American participants for the prices used in the previous studies to test the speech rate explanation. We asked 10 people in each country to read subvocally three samples of the prices used in the experiments. The total pronunciation time was then divided by the number of syllables, which resulted in an average subvocal reading time per syllable of 0.198 sec. for the Hungarians and 0.279 sec. for the Americans. Thus, the Hungarians clearly are faster speakers [..].
So we know that Hungarians speak faster than Americans based on ten people each? Are all Americans’ pronounciations and speech similar enough to generalize? Hungarian doesn’t have that much of a dialect, but I think people’s speech speed still differs. (I know, I know, I couldn’t really set aside the issue of sampling after all.)
So does speed with one language translate into speed with another one? As a native Hungarian speaker, would my speed in English or French be different from native speakers of languages that are, presumably, spoken slower?
By the way, I’m not convinced by the idea that languages with longer words (longer = higher number of syllables that is) are spoken faster necessarily. How does this then explain variation in speed within a language. Swiss romand folks speak French – pretty much the same French – slower than their neighbors in France. How do we explain that? Of course, this is not my area and am not familiar with the cited 1986 study, but I am a bit skeptical. Interesting…
So this is supposed to explain why Hungarians recall longer prices better. Personally, I don’t think it would matter to me how many syllables there were in a price on a tag. I tend to be way too visual for such details. I’d recall the image of the number not its name. Or does it not work that way? Hmm… I’ll have to go test it next time I’m in a store.
[*] I think the Americans are less than 100 college students. The sampling for the Hungarians wasn’t as obvious to identify and I am not about to go through the original study in detail. If anyone figures it out, do post it in the comments.
{ 35 comments }
Stuart 08.16.06 at 5:00 pm
I would have thought speed of speech would be more to do with clarity than some principal of information speed. If you have shorter words with less syllables in a language in general, there would seem to be higher chances of homophones, and words that can be confused if care isn’t taken in the pronunciation, so a slower pattern of speech is likely to be adopted to limit misunderstanding.
cosma 08.16.06 at 5:00 pm
Mark Liberman pointed out lots of good reasons to dismiss the “Hungarian is faster” factoid LanguageLog this morning.
Richard Zach 08.16.06 at 5:05 pm
LanguageLog has something on this too.
Richard Zach 08.16.06 at 5:26 pm
Do prices in Hungary include sales tax? Maybe it’s just that Hungarians are better at recalling exact prices because the prices they see matter, whereas recalling exact prices in America doesn’t matter at all, since the price you see is only approximately what you have to pay at the till.
Uncle Kvetch 08.16.06 at 5:40 pm
recalling exact prices in America doesn’t matter at all
Richard, do you live in a state where the rate of sales tax is left to the whim of whoever happens to be working the cash register? Because otherwise I can’t really make sense of this.
Christopher M 08.16.06 at 6:15 pm
I’d recall the image of the number not its name. Or does it not work that way? Hmm… I’ll have to go test it next time I’m in a store.
This strikes me as the kind of thing for which (1) one’s intuitions about one’s own habits & abilities aren’t reliable, and (2) there’s no simple way to test oneself, because of the “pseudo-uncertainty principle”: the act of observing interferes with the action observed.
Richard Zach 08.16.06 at 6:16 pm
s/doesn’t matter at all/hardly ever matters/
Happy?
g 08.16.06 at 6:24 pm
It is well known among mathematicians that Hungarians are in fact superintelligent aliens. *That’s* why they’re better at remembering prices.
JWP 08.16.06 at 7:37 pm
Since data is, of course, the plural of anecdote, I’ll note that I have in fact been struck by the speed with which Hungarians speak. I don’t know the language myself, but I’ve had several Hungarian friends and colleagues, and have spent a fair amount of time listening to them talk on the phone.
Brett Bellmore 08.16.06 at 7:50 pm
Last time I was looking at this subject, the word was that short term memory functioned in “chunks”, not digits. To wit, 1 and 3 took more “space” to remember than “thirteen”, because “thirteen” is treated by the memory as a single entity.
In other words, I think it would pay to look at the details of how words are “chunked” in Hungarian vs English.
The Continental Op 08.16.06 at 8:11 pm
How does this then explain variation in speed within a language. Swiss romand folks speak French – pretty much the same French – slower than their neighbors in France.
As a transplanted fast-talking New Yorker living in the slow-talking SF Bay Area, I’m acutely (often painfully) aware of the phenomenon.
thomps 08.16.06 at 8:49 pm
if one makes a second leap, one might explain some of Liszt’s style with his growing up speaking in magyar… although maybe it doesn’t say as much about Bartok
KCinDC 08.16.06 at 10:57 pm
Yes, yes, but how does this relate to Stephen Colbert’s interference with the Hungarian bridge naming?
Richard Zach 08.16.06 at 11:33 pm
LanguageLog update
Stuart 08.16.06 at 11:35 pm
An interesting aside to this is that the human mind is capable of understanding and retaining information (speech) at much higher rates than anyone speaks, Hungarian or American. I am obssessed with audio books and listen to them at double the normal speed, Alvin and the Chipmunks style.
abb1 08.17.06 at 3:59 am
Don’t the Italians have longer words and speak faster than other Europeans? It sure seems like it.
stostosto 08.17.06 at 5:18 am
The Finns have very long words, but seem to speak quite slowly.
A sample of Finnish:
>Suomen julkishallinto muodostuu valtion ylimmistä elimistä ja altionhallintojärjestelmästä, joka sisältää keskushallinnon, aluehallinnon ja valtion paikallishallinnon.
Spoken in Finnish this sounds something like a solemn recital of an ode to an old green mountain.
(It means “Down at the store they have a lot of really long prices at the moment. I am going shpping. Can I get you something?”)
Andrew 08.17.06 at 6:07 am
I understand that the Finns pronounce double letters slower than single ones, which makes rhythm an integral part of their speech, thus limiting the speed they can talk at.
Meanwhile, though the only three Hungarian words I know translate as “hello”, “thank you” and “pancakes”, I nonetheless blame my fast-talking Hungarian family for the fact that no-one can ever understand a word I say in English.
thomps 08.17.06 at 2:47 pm
…and though she may have studied with an expert dilectician and grammarian, I can tell you she was born HUNGARIAN (duh duh duh) Not only Hungarian, but of royal blood… she is a PRINCESS. Her blood, he said, is bluer than the danube is or ever was. Royalty is absolutely written on her face…
Vándorló 08.17.06 at 3:28 pm
Thought I’d help you folks out by posting a request for help over at the discussion forum on the main portal in Budapest/Hungary, Caboodle.hu.
Hungarian is of course an agglutinative language, yes like Finnish, but also like Turkish. It also has a horrendous number of cases, varying from 18-26 depending on which book you read.
On top of that they have what is called ‘hangrend’ or ‘vowel harmony’ which have to agree in each word. So you add a case ending on and change some of the letters to match the root of the word.
Then, depending on what you want to emphasise you also change the word order (‘szórend’). And you have to do all this before you even utter a word.
Just take the simple word ‘cheers’ which is ‘egészségedre!’ made up of ‘egészség’ (health) + ‘ed’ (your, familiar singular) + ‘re’ (to).
As a blessing Hungarian has no gender, a spelling system that is very predictable and a simple tense structure.
Anyway, hope some native speakers get involved in the experiment!
Eszter 08.17.06 at 5:15 pm
Christopher M – I appreciate your point, I can see how that wouldn’t work so well.
Finnish is historically related to Hungarian yet I can make no sense of that snippet there. By the way, I thought German was the one known for having super long words. Landwirtschaftlichenproduktionsgenossenschaft was one of our favorites in middle school.
Andrew – sounds like a fair connection to make.:)
Vándorló 08.17.06 at 6:04 pm
Surely the distinction Andrew makes is simply the difference between English being a stress timed language and Hungarian (as well as Estonian, Finnish, Spanish, Japanese…) which is syllable timed language?
But this still doesn’t correlate with speed of expression of a thought or idea. The question I would ask is whether there is a relationship between the form of a language and its conceptual compactness.
Finn’s may not talk fast, but they may say an awful lot.
Kenny Easwaran 08.18.06 at 12:27 am
Isn’t there also a relevant fact about Hungarian here – namely that syllables almost always have one vowel and one consonant (sometimes two)? In English, we’ve got syllables like “strengths” in which we’ve got five consonants and one vowel, or “doubts”, with three consonants and two vowels. That could plausibly lead to a different average length of time per syllable.
Jussi 08.18.06 at 11:47 am
(It means “Down at the store they have a lot of really long prices at the moment. I am going shpping. Can I get you something?â€)
lol, you got away with it :-)
I understand that the Finns pronounce double letters slower than single ones, which makes rhythm an integral part of their speech, thus limiting the speed they can talk at.
Not really, Andrew. Listen to a Finnish commentary of a hockey game, and you’ll hear it can be very fast indeed. (Or were you being ironic?)
Jussi 08.18.06 at 12:05 pm
Finnish is historically related to Hungarian yet I can make no sense of that snippet there.
They’re only very distantly related. About as distantly as the English or German languages are to Persian, according to one expert.
bago 08.18.06 at 8:16 pm
Obviously they’re using reverse hungarian notation.
cm 08.20.06 at 3:14 am
Eszter: It’s “Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft” — two words, both moderately agglutinated. Only is abbreviation (LPG) is one “word”. The long form was hardly ever used, as even in German long words and phrases denoting a commonly used concept are considered somewhat impractical.
Eszter 08.20.06 at 7:54 am
Oh bummer, I always loved that word. Thanks for clarifying.
Jussi 08.20.06 at 9:30 am
Eszter, if you like long words, google “the longest word in the world” and you’ll find a monster with more than 1750 letters.
(…and you could make it longer, if you wanted…)
Eszter 08.20.06 at 11:54 am
Thanks, Jussi, but I think part of the point of LPG was that it actually meant something and was used in day-to-day language. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t used often, but it made sense and was used on occasion.) One of the longest Hungarian words uses rules similar to the ones described with Finnish (as a result of that Google search). But again, it’s not really a word one would use much: megszentségtelenÃthetetlenségeskedéseitekért.. although it is still somewhat meaningful. This page suggests a couple of translations.
cm 08.20.06 at 1:19 pm
Agglutination has its limits. After a few “levels” it is be replaced by grammatical constructs which expose the structure better, and lend themselves better to reading and writing. Agglutination, at least in German, also can only express “linear” relationships. For example, “department of agriculture” can be represented as “agriculturedepartment”, but “department of agriculture and forestry” cannot as the conjunction adds a nonlinear component. There is the (legal and used) construction “agriculture- and forestrydepartment” which is kind of an agglutination, but not technically in a single word.
According to Wikipedia, the longest recent German word in actual use is “Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”, the name of a legal text, which “abbreviates” to “RkReÃœAÃœG”. This is actally a “real-world” case of my example above. This is a law governing tracking of cattle and beef as part of addressing mad cow disease. Google it for more detail if so interested.
Jussi 08.20.06 at 1:48 pm
..but I think part of the point of LPG was that it actually meant something and was used in day-to-day language
Agreed, but if you were referring to one, you would just say LPG blä blä and not Landwirtschaftliches was auch immer.
Unless you were Honnecker :-)
Eszter 08.20.06 at 4:30 pm
Well, Honnecker spoke often enough that one may have encountered the word.:)
CM – I think I’ll take your word for it re RkReÜAÜG, that’s probably as much info as I need on that.:-)
Eli Rabett 08.20.06 at 7:37 pm
Someone once asked my wife why she spoke so fast and she replied “Because I have so much to say…..
Welcome to New York
bago 08.21.06 at 4:54 am
I guess there’s not too many C++ hounds here.
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