TY - JOUR

T1 - Measured and perceived speech tempo

T2 - Comparing canonical and surface articulation rates

AU - Plug, Leendert

AU - Lennon, Robert

AU - Smith, Rachel

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Phonetics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Phonetics, 95, 2022 DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101193

PY - 2022/11/1

Y1 - 2022/11/1

N2 - Studies that quantify speech tempo tend to use one of various available rate measures. The relationship between these measures and perceived tempo as elicited through listening experiments remains poorly understood. This study furthers our understanding of the relationship between measured articulation rates and perceived speech tempo, and the impact of syllable and phone deletions on speech tempo perception. We follow previous work in using stimuli from a corpus of unscripted speech, and in sampling stimuli in distinct ‘global tempo’ ranges. Within our stimulus sets, the differences between canonical and surface rate measurements are directly due to syllable or phone deletions. Our results for syllable rates suggest that listeners use both canonical and surface rates to estimate speech tempo: that is, deletions do not have a consistent effect on perceived tempo. Our results for phone rates suggest that surface phone rate also influences judgements, but canonical phone rate does not. Our results also confirm previously-reported effects of f0 and intensity on speech tempo perception, plus an effect of stimulus duration, but no effect of listeners’ own tempo production tendencies.

AB - Studies that quantify speech tempo tend to use one of various available rate measures. The relationship between these measures and perceived tempo as elicited through listening experiments remains poorly understood. This study furthers our understanding of the relationship between measured articulation rates and perceived speech tempo, and the impact of syllable and phone deletions on speech tempo perception. We follow previous work in using stimuli from a corpus of unscripted speech, and in sampling stimuli in distinct ‘global tempo’ ranges. Within our stimulus sets, the differences between canonical and surface rate measurements are directly due to syllable or phone deletions. Our results for syllable rates suggest that listeners use both canonical and surface rates to estimate speech tempo: that is, deletions do not have a consistent effect on perceived tempo. Our results for phone rates suggest that surface phone rate also influences judgements, but canonical phone rate does not. Our results also confirm previously-reported effects of f0 and intensity on speech tempo perception, plus an effect of stimulus duration, but no effect of listeners’ own tempo production tendencies.

KW - Speech tempo

KW - Articulation rate

KW - Deletion

KW - Perception

KW - English

U2 - 10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101193

DO - 10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101193

M3 - Journal article

VL - 95

JO - Journal of Phonetics

JF - Journal of Phonetics

SN - 0095-4470

M1 - 101193

ER -