Gender and speech fluency in Mandarin and English news interviews

Abstract

Speech fluency affects the effectiveness of speech communications. Previous research has been mostly looking at the fluency performances in L2 and in atypical population. This paper investigates the fluency pattern in news anchor’s natural interview speech, which represents the upper limit of native language fluency, and examines the effect of gender on fluency. We collected a gender-balanced corpus of audio clips of publicly accessible news programs by six native Mandarin speaking news anchors and six native American English news anchors. The total length of interview used in the analysis was 20 min for each language. This study examined six temporal and non-temporal measurements of fluency: temporal measures included speech rate, mean length of run (MLR), mean length of utterance (MLU), and mean length of pauses (MLP); non-temporal disfluency measures included syllable count and disfluency rate. The results showed that male Mandarin speakers had significantly lower MLR, lower MLU, and higher disfluency rates than female Mandarin speakers; no significant gender difference was found in MLP. The English data did not show any gender difference in any measurement. The results indicated that female Mandarin speakers spoke more fluently than male Mandarin speakers, while male English speakers and female speakers were equally fluent.