Abstract
A technique is described for estimating a person's speaking rate from a short utterance. Four speakers read aloud four stories and also a randomized list of the sentences from those stories. An average time per phoneme was calculated for each sentence from the ratio of total speech time (excluding pauses) to the number of phonemes in the sentence. The longest average duration in these data is 66.4 msec per phoneme; the shortest, 59.6 msec per phoneme. Variation in average duration decreases as sentence duration increases. The story version shows a less variable distribution than the list version. In the story version, all sentences longer than 5 sec have average phoneme durations that fall within ±5 msec of the speaker's overall mean phoneme duration, whereas the list version requires sentences 7 sec long to reach this stability.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
