This was recognized by the founding father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, as one of the two fundamental principles of the linguistic sign, the other one being its arbitrary nature ( 1, 2). Human language in its most widespread form (i.e., in spontaneously spoken interactions) is locked in one-dimensional time. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs.

Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. However, this speed is not constant-speakers regularly speed up and slow down. By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed.

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