Methods and a First Look at Speech Rate and Pause

Abstract

Here I present the first of several empirical investigations into speech rate and pause variation. In this first view, I examine a small experimental dataset drawing from read speech from three regions of the US. These data consist of recordings of a short reading passage read by 14 talkers from Memphis, Tennessee (the South), 14 talkers from Oswego, New York (Labov et al.’s 2006 Inland North), and 14 talkers from Reno, Nevada (the West). The talkers are all natives of their respective larger dialect regions, are European Americans, and are adults in the 18–30- year-old range. The data are drawn from research with Valerie Fridland (Kendall and Fridland 2012, Fridland and Kendall 2012).¹ Unlike the data from the remaining chapters, which all come from SLAAP’s archives, the recordings examined here are stored in OSCAAR, the web-based speech resource archive housed at Northwestern University, which was introduced briefly in §3.4.