While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features
and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human
communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how
these languages evolve and are used. Assuming that the capacity to process
information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a
surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We
analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling
for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both
settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in
languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm
that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the
600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration
trade-off in operation, both across and within the world's languages.

研究发现，人类认知塑造了语言的演变和使用，600 种语言的语料库证实了超出和内部有惊讶 - 持续时间权衡的存在，结果是在不同语言中，更少惊讶的音位生成速度更快，反之亦然，并且确认了 319 种语言中更惊讶的音位平均更长。