First Minute Timing in American Telephone Talks: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

Cognitive perspective gives insight into the temporal organization of speech production based on acoustic cues of articulation rate, mean pause duration, total pause time, mean length of pause-free run, phonaton:pause ratio elicited from the first minutes of 30 American speakers’ telephone talks. We assume that by balancing the number of speakers in three age groups (young, middle-aged, old) and two gender groups we found age effects and gender differences in the acoustic data which was revealing as regards overall speaking rates and fluency, as well as suggested interpretation in terms of the speed of online processing and working memory capacity of the speakers. Basic findings are concerned with the following: positive correlation between articulation rate and mean length of run; negative correlation between silent pause duration and mean length of run; positive correlation between phonation/pause ratio and mean length of run; negative correlation between silent pause duration and phonation/pause ratio. Cognitively significant is the evidence that men spend more time in thinking but articulate faster than women. Women spend less time in pauses. However, young women are still the fastest talkers in the six subgroups. Age-related changes are most characteristic for the transition from young age to middle age when middle-aged speakers tend to shorten both their pauses and pause free runs. Mean length of run measured in number of syllables increases in old age compared to the middle age. The interplay of biological and social factors appears to account for the new facts found in middle-aged and old-aged groups of American speakers on the phone.