Temporal organization of speech for normal and fast rates

Abstract

This paper characterizes the temporal organization of speech within interstress intervals (ISI) for fast and normal rates of speech for two groups of English speakers: . normal speakers (NS), and a group of disfluent speakers (DS) whose speech rate was clinically rated as “slow”. Duration measurements of stressed vowels, (SV) unstressed vowels (USV) and intervowel intervals (IVI) were obtained for ISIs ranging in length from one to five syllables for normal and fast rates of speech. Despite some differences, both groups were observed to show similar trends in the compression of SVs and IVIs for local (i.e., within ISIs) and global (i.e., fast speech) rate increase. Following the initial identification of these speech components as good predictors of speech rate, we investigated two measures of speech rate based on IVI as they can be computed without the linguistic knowledge of the utterance.