Mehmet Emrah CANGİ, Ayşe IŞILDAR, Aleyna TEKİN, Ayşe Buse SARAÇ

A preliminary study of normative speech rate values of Turkish speaking adults

Objectives: One of the main prosodic components oflanguage is the rate. Speaking and articulation rates aretwo different measurements that reflect various aspectsof each other. This study mainly aimed to present preliminary normative data related to speaking rate, readingrate, articulation rate and articulation rate in reading forTurkish-speaking adults and also aimed to compare thesefour measurements in terms of gender.Methods: The present study included 84 university students (42 males and 42 females) aged between 19-24years old whose native language was Turkish. Poweranalysis was calculated based on the articulation rate.Speech and articulation rates were measured by taking400-syllable conversational speech samples from eachparticipant. A text was used from the Adult II section ofthe Turkish version of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Testto measure their reading rates. The speaking and readingsamples obtained were recorded with a voice recorderand analyzed with the PRAAT software.Results: There was a statistically significant differenceboth between their speaking and reading rates, and between articulation rate and articulation rate in reading.Male participants had significantly higher articulationrates in speaking and reading than females.Conclusion: The present study provided evidence that thespeech rate is low and articulation rate is high in Turkish.It concluded that the significant difference between articulation rates by gender in many languages is also validfor Turkish.

PDF

___

1. Reed BS. Beyond the particular: prosody and the coordination of actions. Lang Speech 2012;55:13-34.

2. Costa LM, Martins-Reis Vde O, Celeste LC. Methods of analysis speech rate: a pilot study. Codas 2016;28:41-5.

3. Walker JF, Archibald LM. Articulation rate in preschool children: a 3-year longitudinal study. Int J Lang Commun Disord 2006;41:541-65.

4. Sturm JA, Seery CH. Speech and articulatory rates of school-age children in conversation and narrative contexts. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch 2007;38:47-59.

5. Amir O, Grinfeld D. Articulation rate in childhood and adolescence: Hebrew speakers. Lang Speech 2011;54:225-40.

6. Robb MP, Maclagan MA, Chen Y. Speaking rates of American and New Zealand varieties of English. Clin Linguist Phon 2004;18:1-15.

7. Hall KD, Amir O, Yairi E. A longitudinal investigation of speaking rate in preschool children who stutter. J Speech Lang Hear Res 1999;42:1367- 77.

8. Yaruss JS. Utterance timing and childhood stuttering. J Fluency Disord 1997;22:263-86.

9. Duffy JR. Motor speech disorders-e-book: Substrates, differential diagnosis, and management. 3rd ed. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Mosby; 2013.

10. Papathanasiou I, Coppens P, Ansaldo AI. Plasticity and Recovery in Aphasia. In Papathanasiou I, Coppens P, Potagas C, editors. Aphasia and Related Neurogenic Communication Disorders. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning; 2013. p. 49-66.

11. Small JA, Kemper S, Lyons K. Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease: effects of grammatical complexity, speech rate, and repetition. Psychol Aging 1997;12:3-11.

12. Pellegrino F, Coupé C, Marsico EA. A cross-language perspective on speech information rate. Language 2011;87:539-58.

13. Tauroza S, Allison D. Speech Rates in British English. Appl Linguist 1990;11;90-105.

14. Grosjean F, Deschamps A. Analysis of Time Variables in Spontaneous French. [Article in French] Phonetica 1973;28:191-226.

15. Malécot A, Johnston R, Kizziar PA. Syllabic rate and utterance length in French. Phonetica 1972;26:235-51.

16. Almberg J. How fast do we really speak? [Article in Norwegian] Norlyd: Tromsø University Working Papers on Lang Linguist 2000;28:60-73.

17. Blaauw E. On the perceptual classification of spontaneous and read speech. Ph.D. dissertation, LEd, Utrecht, 1995.

18. Rebollo-Couto L. Spanish and Portuguese rythm. Syllable-based or stress-based ? [Article in French] Travaux de l’Institut de phonétique de Strasbourg (Revue) 1997;27:63-90.

19. Lee A, Doherty R. Speaking rate and articulation rate of native speakers of Irish English. Speech, Lang Hear 2017;20:206-11.

20. Leemann A, Kolly MJ, Dellwo V. Crowdsourcing regional variation in speaking rate through the iOS app ‘Dialäkt Äpp’. In: Speech Prosody, Dublin, 20 May 2014 - 23 May 2014.

21. Jacewicz E, Fox RA, O’Neill C, Salmons J. Articulation rate across dialect, age, and gender. Lang Var Change 2009;21:233-56.

22. Amir O. Speaking rate among adult hebrew speakers: A preliminary observation. Ann Behav Sci 2016;2:1-9.

23. Verhoeven J, De Pauw G, Kloots H. Speech rate in a pluricentric language: a comparison between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands. Lang Speech 2004;47:297-308.

24. Yuan J, Liberman M, Cieri C. Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2006: The Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Pittsburgh, PA: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA); 2006. p. 541-4.

25. İyigün E, Bekircan M, Maviş İ. Effects of Age, Education and Gender on Reading Speed of Adults. [Article in Turkish] DKYAD 2018;1:162-78.

26. Nip IS, Green JR. Increases in cognitive and linguistic processing primarily account for increases in speaking rate with age. Child Dev 2013;84:1324-37.

27. Quené H. On the just noticeable difference for tempo in speech. J Phon 2007;35:353-62.

28. Whiteside SP. Temporal-based acoustic-phonetic patterns in read speech: some evidence for speaker sex differences. J Int Phon Assoc 1996;26:23- 40.

29. Kim J. Effects of gender, age, and individual speakers on articulation rate in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech. Phonetics Speech Sci 2018;10:19- 29.

30. Block S, Killen D. Speech rates of Australian English-speaking children and adults. Australian Hum Commun Res 1996;24:39-44.

31. Damhoureyeh MA, Darawsheh WB, Qa’dan WN, Natour YS. Preliminary speech rate normative data in adult Jordanian speakers. JLTR 2020;11:204-11.

32. Erden G, Kurdoğlu F, Uslu R. Development of Grade Level Norms for Reading Speed and Writing Errors of Turkish Elementary School Children. [Article in Turkish] Turk Psikiyatri Derg 2002;13:5-13.

33. Girgin MC. Speech rates of Turkish prelingually hearing-impaired children. Int J Spec Educ 2008;23:27-32.

34. Trouvain J, Möbius B. Sources of variation of articulation rate in native and non-native speech: comparisons of French and German. In Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody. Dublin, Ireland: 2014. p. 275-9.

35. Arvaniti A, Rodriguez T. The role of rhythm class, speaking rate and F0 in language discrimination. Lab Phonol 2013;4:7-38.

36. Polyanskaya L, Samuel AG, Ordin M. Regularity in speech rhythm as a social coalition signal. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2019;1453:153-65.

37. White L, Mattys SL. Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. J Phon 2007;35:501-22.

38. Trauzettel-Klosinski S, Dietz K; IReST Study Group. Standardized assessment of reading performance: the New International Reading Speed Texts IReST. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 2012;53:5452-61.

39. Bortfeld H, Leon SD, Bloom JE, Schober MF, Brennan SE. Disfluency rates in conversation: effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender. Lang Speech 2001;44:123-47.

40. Henley N. Body politics: Power, sex, and nonverbal communication. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice-Hall; 1977.