Fig. 1: The preferred information rate is the result of a balance between predictability and complexity.
From: Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions
The mean (preferred information rate) and standard deviation (tolerance for a different information rate) can change over development, intention, and socio-environmental context. For instance, speakers spontaneously increase their speech redundancy when talking in a noisy environment to maintain the same signal-to-noise ratio11. CR (Compression Ratio) indicates complexity measured as the length of the shortest description of the message divided by the length of the original message (see Methods—Text informativeness metric). A small CR (≃0) indicates low information density, high signal-to-noise ratio, and high predictability; a large CR (≃1) indicates high information density, low signal-to-noise ratio, and low predictability.
