Velocidade de fala e inteligibilidade: possíveis influências no inglês como língua franca

Abstract

Considering the importance of the English language as a lingua franca (ELF) in interactions among different cultures/languages, it is important that Phonetics and Phonology studies pay attention to aspects that may influence its intelligibility. Informants of perception experiments have reported that, among the many factors that negatively affect intelligibility, speech rate seems to play an important role. This article aims at showing the results of research by Gonçalves (2021), relating the measurements of six parameters linked to speech rate with the intelligibility of the English language, according to intelligibility data by Brazilian listeners already collected by Becker (2013) and Becker and Rossini (2017). The six measurement parameters were: speech rate, articulation rate, phones per second, utterance time, pause time and total articulation time. The first two are brought by Barbosa (2019), and the others by Costa, Martins-Reis and Celeste (2016). Based on the descriptive results obtained from the analyzed data - and without inferential statistical analysis, certainly a next step of the research - it was not possible to determine whether or not there is a relationship between speech rate in English and its intelligibility for Brazilian listeners.