Abstract
This study is part of the investigations concerning the listening comprehensibility of radio news that are carried out at the Seminar for Speech Sciences and Phonetics. The slowly spoken news of Deutsche Welle (a German radio station), which pose a special format of radio news, are the object of investigation. These news are produced to make easier the understanding of radio news for lear-ners of German on the levels B2 to C1. This paper examines, whether slowly spoken is to be equated with comprehensibly spoken. As a pilot study six news readings in original tempo and another six in a slow tempo were analysed. Text-linguistic, stylistic and journalistic features of the text were analysed, along with an auditory-phonetic analysis of the following features: pause duration, speech rate, number and interval of intermediate phrase boundaries and number and interval of accents. The slowly spoken news have specific characteristics: a great number of pauses (some of them stereotypical), decelerated articulation (mainly by high tension in articulating and emphatic lengthening) as well as very frequent, sometimes nonsensical accents. According to the perception of speech scientists, especially the increase in accent density and the nonsensical shortening of prosodic units tend to impair the comprehensibility of a reading. Apart from this, an improvement in comprehensibility is not only achieved by a reasonably slow speech rate but, among other things, by simplifying the text of the news.
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