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The same text, at that. So the text has N bits of information and it was, according to the article, spoken at different speeds per language. So N bits at different speeds per language, exactly the opposite of their claim.

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No, the text does not have the same amount of information in every language, because they are talking about the information in the audio, not the semantic value. Your brain categorizes each syllable it hears into one of N classifications, where N differs by language. So the max intelligible playback speed (in syllables per second), multiplied by the syllabic entropy (in bits per syllable), tends to land on 39bit/s.

Ah, I read too quickly and misunderstood their meaning of "bit rate."

> researchers took their final step—multiplying this rate by the bit rate to find out how much information moved per second

Thank you for your explanation, worth a bag of gold!

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