The role of articulation rate in distinguishing fast and slow speakers

This article discusses differences in articulation rate between fast and slow speakers in a production experiment. It is shown that fast and slow speakers differ in their articulation rates, both in terms of the number of phones in the canonical form (intended rate) as well as the number of phones present in the actual realization (realized rate). The articulatory precision index, which indicates the relative deletion rate, also differs for these speakers. The same differences are observed for fast and slow inter-pause stretches in a large German database of spontaneous speech. Both in the database and for the production experiment, however, there is considerable overlap between the measurements for fast and slow speakers. This shows that other factors also play a role in distinguishing fast and slow speakers or inter-pause stretches. The relationship between these factors and the articulation rates is discussed. 1