Novelty in Speech & Text

Redundancy

Spoken and written language contains a lot of redundancy

Presumably it evolved to retain meaning despite high levels of ambient noise, crosstalk from other people.

Individual letters can be omitted, wit?out los?ng ??? mes??ge

Try to quickly scan read the following:
"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae."

Therefore the information content is far smaller than that of the characters.
This is what makes predictive text possible

This is why texting requires much less data than the equivalent speech

Published Estimates:

In the literature there are estimates of the information capacity of speech
Ref H. Quastler & V.J.Wulff (Atteneave 1959)

Input:

Listening to Speech = about 20 bits/second

Silent Reading = less than 44 Bits/second

Output:

Typing = 15 bits/second

Speech 18 bits/second typical

Pianist playing random notes 22 bits/second Maximum