Speaking rate adjustment across changes in talker

Abstract

Individuals vary their speaking rate, and listeners use the speaking rate of precursor sentences to adjust for these changes [Kidd (1989)]. Recent work has suggested that speaking rate adjustment may not always be limited to speech from a single talker (Sawusch and Newman, 2000). When a talker change occurs in the midst of a vowel, the durations of both portions of the vowel influence perception of the rate-based contrast. In the present experiments, we examined the effect of talker change on rate normalization for precursor phrases. A male talker produced the sentence, I heard him say the word—at one of three different speaking rates. A female talker then produced a nonword containing a duration-based contrast. We examined whether the male talker’s speaking rate would influence perception of the female talker’s speech. The results were somewhat surprising. The speaking rate of the first talker did influence perception of the contrast in the second talker. However, the effect was a U-shaped function of speaking rate, rather than the linear function typically demonstrated in the single-voice condition. Several follow-up studies replicated this basic pattern. Implications of this finding for studies of rate normalization will be discussed.