Effects Of Speech Rate Research Articles

Slow speech rate effects on stuttering preschoolers with disordered phonology

To study the effects of clinicians’ slow rate on the speech of children who stutter with and without a concomitant phonological disorder, an A–B–A–B single case design was used with six clinician–child dyads, where B = Clinician’s slow speech rate model. Two boys and one girl, aged 49–54 months, stuttering with disordered phonology (S + DP), were compared to three boys aged 42–50 months, stuttering with normal phonology (S + NP). Articulation rates were measured in phones per second (pps) in clinician–child adjacent utterance pairs. The S + NP dyads showed improved fluency in the B condition through a larger effect size, higher mean baseline stutter reductions and lower percentages of non-overlapping data than did the S + DP dyads. The S + DP girl showed relatively improved fluency in the B condition. S + DP children showed no articulation rate alignment (Range: 16% decrease to a 1.2% increase), whereas S + NP children averaged a 20% pps rate reduction (Range: 19.6–25.4% decrease), aligning with their clinicians who averaged a 38% pps rate reduction from baseline. The S + DP group spoke significantly (z = −4.63; p < 0.00) slower at baseline (Mdn = 6.9 pps; SE = 0.07 pps) than S + NP children in previously published samples (Mdn = 9.8 pps; SE = 0.22 pps). Results suggest that a slow rate model alone is not effective for facilitating fluency in S + DP boys with time since onset of about 2 years.

Accent and speech rate effects in English as a lingua franca

The study examines whether a slower speech rate enhances listening comprehension of unfamiliar English varieties. The participants were 179 Japanese university students studying English as a foreign language in Japan. Speech samples elicited from a variety of fluent English speakers were digitally recorded. In our first experiment, we determined that a less familiar accent (Indian English) was more difficult for these students to comprehend than a more familiar North American English accent. In the second experiment, Japanese participants heard the samples first at the original speech rate and then, several weeks later, at a reduced rate. When listening to the most heavily accented speaker, participants, irrespective of their proficiency, achieved significantly higher mean comprehension scores with the slowed speech rate. However, no significant speech rate effect was observed for the less heavily accented samples. The results of the study will contribute to pedagogical developments in teaching English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).

Word informativity influences acoustic duration: Effects of contextual predictability on lexical representation

Language-users reduce words in predictable contexts. Previous research indicates that reduction may be stored in lexical representation if a word is often reduced. Because representation influences production regardless of context, production should be biased by how often each word has been reduced in the speaker’s prior experience. This study investigates whether speakers have a context-independent bias to reduce low-informativity words, which are usually predictable and therefore usually reduced. Content word durations were extracted from the Buckeye and Switchboard speech corpora, and analyzed for probabilistic reduction effects using a language model based on spontaneous speech in the Fisher corpus. The analysis supported the hypothesis: low-informativity words have shorter durations, even when the effects of local contextual predictability, frequency, speech rate, and several other variables are controlled for. Additional models that compared word types against only other words of the same segmental length further supported this conclusion. Words that usually appear in predictable contexts are reduced in all contexts, even those in which they are unpredictable. The result supports representational models in which reduction is stored, and where sufficiently frequent reduction biases later production. The finding provides new evidence that probabilistic reduction interacts with lexical representation.

Stress- and speech rate-induced vowel quality variation in Catalan and Spanish

This paper examines the effects of lexical stress and speech rate on vowel quality and duration in Central Catalan and Iberian Spanish and compares the patterns of phonetic variation caused by these two factors. For Catalan, with phonological vowel reduction, both absence of stress and fast speech rate result in vowel centralization and shorter durations, consistent with findings reported for other languages. For Spanish, the effects of speech rate are in line with those found for Catalan. Vowel quality is also sensitive to the absence of lexical stress in this language without phonological vowel reduction, however, not in a homogeneous and consistent way across speakers. The important individual variation observed suggests that the effect of stress on vowel quality is not conventionalized in Spanish. In addition, the durational difference between stressed and unstressed vowels is smaller in Spanish than in Catalan and less stable. This paper contributes data from two closely-related Western Romance languages (with important phonological differences) to a body of cross-linguistic research dealing with the influence of prosodic factors at the segmental level.

Long-Term Temporal Tracking of Speech Rate Affects Spoken-Word Recognition

Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour.

The effect of context speech rate in the recognition of English auxiliary verbs

This paper investigates the context-dependent speech rate to perceive function words (i.e., auxiliary verbs). Whether the rate-dependent recognition is affected by the sequence of words with or without auxiliary verbs is examined. The experiment used two types of spoken sentences: (1) those with an auxiliary verb and (2) those in which the auxiliary verb was phonetically deleted. The recognition of auxiliary verbs was not greater for contexts with a normal or fast speech rate than for context temporal information (e.g., speech rate). Interestingly, the shift of context was not focused on the speech rate of the target word (i.e., auxiliary verb). Rather, the shift between the target and context in speech rate functioned as a cue to perceive the auxiliary verb. That is, the proportion of correctly perceived auxiliary verbs was greater when the target was manipulated to have a different speech rate from the context. When an auxiliary verb was deleted in the context, the participants reported recognizing, although the proportion of responses was very low for both the normal and fast speech rates. In the normal speech, the proportion was unchanged in terms of the goodness rating. However, another interesting finding was that in the fast speech rate, the recognition of auxiliary verbs increased when the goodness ratings were close to the poorest exemplar. This result is a counter example to the case of American English speakers. In the current study, the Korean participants learning English at a primary level were not accustomed to the rate of speech in American English. Based on the experiment results, this study implies that Korean students learning English should be taught in terms of ratedependent context so that they can perceive the function words with reduction or deletion in American English.

Effects of speech rate, phonetic background and gender on vowel reduction in the speech of nonnative speakers of English

AbstractThe paper reports the results of a study investigating vowel reduction in the speech of non-native speakers of English. The aim was to unravel the links between reduction and speech rate, phonetic training and gender. We hypothesized that (i) Polish speakers of English reduce vowels; (ii) they speak slower than native speakers; (iii) the higher the rate, the higher the reduction degree; (iv) speakers with phonetic training reduce less than those lacking it; (v) male subjects reduce more than the female ones. In order to realize these aims, an acoustic analysis of vowels was performed on 2 hrs 42 mins of speech produced by 12 Polish speakers of English. The subjects were di-vided into an experimental group consisting of 6 students of English and a control group with 6 speakers who had no phonetic training. The obtained results positively verify that non-native speakers reduce vowels and cast some doubts on whether they speak slower than native speakers. The role of rate and gender could not be established due to statistical and methodological issues. The group with no phonetic training outperformed the group which underwent phonetic training, pointing instead to the role of exposure and perhaps music training in acquiring native-like reduction patterns.

The Effect of Speech Rate on Formant Frequency Movements

The Effect of Speech Rate on Formant Frequency Movements

Effects of tonal distance and speech rate in the phonetic realization of Kinande H tones

Effects of tonal distance and speech rate in the phonetic realization of Kinande H tones

Effects of native language and speech rate on perceptual and decisional processing of voicing and syllable affiliation in stops

Previous work shows that variation in speech rate influences the perception of voicing distinctions (/b/-/p/) and syllable affiliation (“pea”-“eep”), and it is well-documented that native language influences how listeners perceive phonological distinctions. We analyze the influences of speech rate and native language in the perception of voicing and syllable affiliation by applying a model of perception and response selection to data from Japanese, English, and Korean listeners who identified the voicing and the syllable affiliation of (English) stops produced at slow, moderate, and fast rates. The fitted model indicates that for all three native language groups, perceptual salience decreases substantially as speech rate increases for both voicing and syllable affiliation. Even at slow rates, however, the salience of voicing is lower for coda than for onset stops. In addition, as rate increases, all three groups exhibit an increasing bias toward “onset” responses, with a bias toward “voiced” responses for coda stimuli and toward “voiceless” responses for onset stimuli. Despite broad similarities across all three groups, fine-grained patterns of perceptual salience and response bias vary with listeners’ native language. These data and fitted models illustrate the utility of rate-varied speech in investigations of native language effects in speech perception.

The slower the better? Does the speaker's speech rate influence children's performance on a language comprehension test?

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of speech rate on children's performance on a widely used language comprehension test, the Test for Reception of Grammar, version 2 (TROG'2), and to explore how test performance interacts with task difficulty and with the child's working memory capacity. Participants were 102 typically-developing Swedish-speaking children randomly assigned to one of the three conditions; the TROG'2 sentences spoken by a speech-language pathologist with slow, normal or fast speech rate. Results showed that the fast speech rate had a negative effect on the TROG'2 scores and that slow rate was more beneficial in general. However, for more difficult tasks the beneficial effect of slow speech was only pronounced for children with better scores on a working memory task. The interpretation is that slow speech is particularly helpful when children do not yet fully master a task but are just about to grasp it. These results emphasize the necessity of careful considerations of the role dynamic aspects of examiner's speech might play in test administration and favour digitalized procedures in standardized language comprehension assessment.

Effects of speech rate on the impression of personality

Effects of speech rate on the impression of personality

Systematic studies of modified vocalization: the effect of speech rate on speech production measures during metronome‐paced speech in persons who stutter

Metronome-paced speech results in the elimination, or substantial reduction, of stuttering moments. The cause of fluency during this fluency-inducing condition is unknown. Several investigations have reported changes in speech pattern characteristics from a control condition to a metronome-paced speech condition, but failure to control speech rate between conditions limits our ability to determine if the changes were necessary for fluency. This study examined the effect of speech rate on several speech production variables during one-syllable-per-beat metronomic speech in order to determine changes that may be important for fluency during this fluency-inducing condition. Thirteen persons who stutter (PWS), aged 18-62 years, completed a series of speaking tasks. Several speech production variables were compared between conditions produced at different metronome beat rates, and between a control condition and a metronome-paced speech condition produced at a rate equal to the control condition. Vowel duration, voice onset time, pressure rise time and phonated intervals were significantly impacted by metronome beat rate. Voice onset time and the percentage of short (30-100 ms) phonated intervals significantly decreased from the control condition to the equivalent rate metronome-paced speech condition. A reduction in the percentage of short phonated intervals may be important for fluency during syllable-based metronome-paced speech for PWS. Future studies should continue examining the necessity of this reduction. In addition, speech rate must be controlled in future fluency-inducing condition studies, including neuroimaging investigations, in order for this research to make a substantial contribution to finding the fluency-inducing mechanism of fluency-inducing conditions.

STARR

The objective was to develop and evaluate a new sentence test, the Sentence Test with Adaptive Randomized Roving levels, intended to emulate everyday listening experience, using both normal-hearing (NH) and cochlear implant (CI) groups, examining practicality, learning, test-retest variability, and interlist variability. In experiment 1, each of 25 NH adults was tested using five lists, each comprising 30 sentences. One male and one female speaker each spoke 15 sentences. Ten sentences were presented at each of three presentation levels: 50, 65, and 80 dB SPL. The relative level of a speech-shaped noise was varied adaptively to estimate the speech reception threshold (SRT). Counterbalance for list order was achieved by staggering the allocation of lists to participants. To allow assessment of learning effects, no practice was given. The variability of mean SRTs across lists was small, but correction factors were derived for each list so that, after correction, all lists gave the same mean SRT. Test-retest variability was estimated by examining the corrected SRTs for each subject's five lists. In experiment 2, 25 CI users each received one test list after a small amount of practice. Experiment 3 examined the effect of speech rate using time-compressed speech, for age-matched NH and CI users. The mean SRT for the NH participants was approximately -6 dB and was similar for the male and female speakers. There was a small but significant improvement in SRTs between the first and later lists administered, but no further improvement for subsequent lists. On the basis of the variability of the corrected SRTs within each participant, a 2.2 dB difference in SRT is meaningful for comparisons using one test list per condition, for a single participant. The percentage of key words correct varied with presentation level over a 13% range, being best at 65 dB SPL. Only 40% of the CI group achieved an SRT lower than 20 dB for both speakers. There was large individual variability in the SRTs, and SRTs were higher for the female than for the male speaker. For the CI participants, the percentage of key words correct varied markedly with level, from 19% at the lowest level to 57% at the medium level. Time compression had a small effect for NH participants but a very large effect for CI participants. The Sentence Test with Adaptive Randomized Roving levels seems practical to administer and is reasonably sensitive. For NH participants, a 2.2 dB difference in SRT is meaningful for a single list per condition and a single participant. Although learning effects were small for NH participants, it seems prudent to provide some practice sentences when testing hearing-impaired or CI participants. The very large effect of time compression for the CI group has implications for live voice testing of children, because speech rate is only poorly controlled in such testing.

New tests of the distal speech rate effect: examining cross-linguistic generalization.

Recent findings [Dilley and Pitt, 2010. Psych. Science. 21, 1664–1670] have shown that manipulating context speech rate in English can cause entire syllables to disappear or appear perceptually. The current studies tested two rate-based explanations of this phenomenon while attempting to replicate and extend these findings to another language, Russian. In Experiment 1, native Russian speakers listened to Russian sentences which had been subjected to rate manipulations and performed a lexical report task. Experiment 2 investigated speech rate effects in cross-language speech perception; non-native speakers of Russian of both high and low proficiency were tested on the same Russian sentences as in Experiment 1. They decided between two lexical interpretations of a critical portion of the sentence, where one choice contained more phonological material than the other (e.g., /str′na/ “side” vs. /str′na/ “country”). In both experiments, with native and non-native speakers of Russian, context speech rate and the relative duration of the critical sentence portion were found to influence the amount of phonological material perceived. The results support the generalized rate normalization hypothesis, according to which the content perceived in a spectrally ambiguous stretch of speech depends on the duration of that content relative to the surrounding speech, while showing that the findings of Dilley and Pitt (2010) extend to a variety of morphosyntactic contexts and a new language, Russian. Findings indicate that relative timing cues across an utterance can be critical to accurate lexical perception by both native and non-native speakers.

The effect of speech rate on stuttering frequency, phonated intervals, speech effort, and speech naturalness during chorus reading

PurposeThis study examined the effect of speech rate on phonated intervals (PIs), in order to test whether a reduction in the frequency of short PIs is an important part of the fluency-inducing mechanism of chorus reading. The influence of speech rate on stuttering frequency, speaker-judged speech effort, and listener-judged naturalness was also examined. An added purpose was to determine if chorus reading could be further refined so as to provide a perceptual guide for gauging the level of physical effort exerted during speech production. MethodsA repeated-measures design was used to compare data obtained during control reading conditions and during several chorus reading conditions produced at different speech rates. Participants included 8 persons who stutter (PWS) between the ages of 16 and 32years. ResultsThere were significant reductions in the frequency of short PIs from the habitual reading condition during slower chorus conditions, no change when speech rates were matched between habitual reading and chorus conditions, and an increase in the frequency of short PIs during chorus reading produced at a faster rate than the habitual condition. Speech rate did not have an effect on stuttering frequency during chorus reading. In general, speech effort ratings improved and naturalness ratings worsened as speech rate decreased. ConclusionThese results provide evidence that (a) a reduction in the frequency of short PIs is not necessary for fluency improvement during chorus reading, and (b) speech rate may be altered to provide PWS with a more appropriate reference for how physically effortful normally fluent speech production should be. Future investigations should examine the necessity of changes in the activation of neural regions during chorus reading, the possibility of defining individualized units on a 9-point effort scale, and if there are upper and lower speech rate boundaries for receiving ratings of “highly natural sounding” speech during chorus reading.Learning outcomes: The reader will be able to: (1) describe the effect of changes in speech rate on the frequency of short phonated intervals during chorus reading, (2) describe changes to speaker-judged speech effort as speech rate changes during chorus reading, (3) and describe the effect of changes in speech rate on listener-judged naturalness ratings during chorus reading.

When syntax meets prosody: Tonal and duration variability in French Accentual Phrases

Though two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or to the existence of an additional level of phrasing ranked between the AP and the Intonation Phrase. This paper examines the effect of syntactic boundary strength on two phonetic correlates of boundary marking in French, for the AP level. Specifically, preboundary lengthening and tonal cues associated to four boundary levels are investigated through duration and f0 measures. Results show that the alignment of the AP boundary with a major syntactic break significantly modifies the degree of preboundary lengthening associated with the boundary. More precisely, AP-final syllables aligned with a NP/VP break are longer than AP-final syllables contained within a complex NP, though they are not marked by a stronger tonal boundary. Effects of speech rate on the tonal composition of the AP are also reported. We discuss the implications in the light of current models of French prosodic structure and the syntax/prosody interface.

Effects of speech rate on the impression of speech

Effects of speech rate on the impression of speech

Effects of Gaze and Speech Rate on Receivers' Evaluations of Persuasive Speech

This study examined how gaze and speech rate affect perceptions of a speaker. Participants viewed a video recording of one of four persuasive messages delivered by a female speaker. Analysis of speech rate, gaze, and listener's sex revealed that when combined with a small amount of gaze, slow speech rate decreased trustworthiness as compared to a fast speech rate. For women, slow speech rate was thought to be indicative of less expertise as compared to a fast speech rate, again when combined with low gaze. There were no significant interactions, but there were main effects of gaze and speech rate on persuasiveness. High levels of gaze and slow speech rate each enhanced perceptions of the speaker's persuasiveness.

Effects of Speech Rate and Practice on the Allocation of Visual Attention in Multiple Object Naming

Earlier studies had shown that speakers naming several objects typically look at each object until they have retrieved the phonological form of its name and therefore look longer at objects with long names than at objects with shorter names. We examined whether this tight eye-to-speech coordination was maintained at different speech rates and after increasing amounts of practice. Participants named the same set of objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names on up to 20 successive trials. In Experiment 1, they spoke as fast as they could, whereas in Experiment 2 they had to maintain a fixed moderate or faster speech rate. In both experiments, the durations of the gazes to the objects decreased with increasing speech rate, indicating that at higher speech rates, the speakers spent less time planning the object names. The eye–speech lag (the time interval between the shift of gaze away from an object and the onset of its name) was independent of the speech rate but became shorter with increasing practice. Consistent word length effects on the durations of the gazes to the objects and the eye-speech lags were only found in Experiment 2. The results indicate that shifts of eye gaze are often linked to the completion of phonological encoding, but that speakers can deviate from this default coordination of eye gaze and speech, for instance when the descriptive task is easy and they aim to speak fast.