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Previous research has demonstrated that normally developing children are expected to have adult like control of their speech production skills by 10 years of age, as evidenced by increases in speed of production and decreases in performance variability. (e. g. Kent and Fortier 1980). There is also some evidence to suggest that phonologically disordered children may have poorer speech motor skills than their normally developing peers (e. g. Henry 1990, Edwards 1992, Waters 1992, Towne 1994). There are numerous techniques that can be used to measure a number of different aspects of speech motor control. However, there are methodological difficulties in devising appropriate protocols for the collection and analysis of speed of speech production as used as an index of speech motor skill in young children. Some of the techniques that have had clinical application include measurement of rate in connected speech production and measurement of diadochokinetic (DDK) repetition rate. This investigation compared normally developing and phonologically disordered preschool children on various indirect measures of speech motor skills, in imitated and spontaneous connected speech and in DDK tasks. The investigation also focused on refining the techniques of data collection and analysis appropriate to young children. While the results vary with regard to the statistical significance of the differences between the two groups of children on articulation rates and DDK rates, analysis of the error patterns in single word, spontaneous connected speech, imitated connected speech and DDK productions identified a sub group of phonologically disordered children who may present with an underlying speech motor deficit as the basis of their phonological disability. The results of the investigation are considered in terms of their implication for the speech motor skills of the two groups of children, techniques for measuring various aspects of speech motor skill and the clinical identification of phonologically disordered children who have an underlying speech motor deficit.

This thesis deals with temporal characteristics of tone units in read speeches of professional speakers. The main goal of the research is to follow variability of the articulation rate (AR) within tone units. Thus, the domain where we investigate AR is the tone unit and we also deal with the general articulation rate. Read narrations in Czech in wildlife documentaries represented the studied material. To verify the statistical significance, we used the linear mixed effects model and the ANOVA test. The results of the measurement of the general average articulation rate within the narrations showed that the values of one speaker were significantly different from those of the other speakers. Interpersonal variability was also proved by the ANOVA tests and intrapersonal variability was also evidenced. The average AR values with regard to linear segmentation proved to be relatively uniform. Statistical verifications did not prove any statistical significance either. In our analyses of tone units, we investigated whether AR was influenced by the size of tone units in prosodic words, further by the position of the prosodic word in the tone unit, and what were the directions of AR changes inside the unit. Statistical tests were used to verify the significance of the impact of the tone unit size as well as...

This diploma thesis examines speech rate in three different speech styles - in reading, prepared semi-spontaneous monologue and consecutive interpreting from English into Czech. In the first part of the thesis we summarize previous research, define several types of speech rate, pauses and all three speech styles. In the second part, dedicated to empirical research, we first describe the material and speakers, and then we continue with information about recording and processing of the recordings, mainly the two ways of segmentation into inter-pause units. The results are summarized in three sub-chapters; one looks at speaking rate, the next deals with articulation rate and the last one is dedicated to pauses. The last subchapter in the Results chapter compares our findings with both Czech and foreign research into the topic. Altogether we analysed recordings of four female speakers (two students and two prefessional interpreters) in three speech styles. In each of the styles we calculated speaking rate of the whole text, speaking rate of four linear parts (introduction, main part 1, main part 2 and conclusion) and articulation rate of one chosen unit from each linear part. Our results suggest that the highest speaking rate and articulation rate are in reading; semi-spontaneous speech is somewhat...

While a number of studies have sought to investigate ESL speakers' fluency gains over the course of one 15-week semester, few if any studies have investigated these changes over a longer developmental period. A critical factor in researching longitudinal change is that students do not often remain in an intensive English program (IEP) for more than two semesters before moving to a new school, applying to an American university, or returning to their home country. Longitudinal research, therefore, is necessary as program administrators, teachers, and learners all seek to understand points where change in oral fluency actually occurs. For this study data were collected from students in a large intensive English program over a 45-week period. For 39 ESL learners audio files from speaking tasks that were part of placement and end-of-semester level achievement tests were collected and analyzed. Specific oral fluency features such as speech rate, articulation rate, and pause frequency were investigated. This thesis will share the results of the analysis while also discussing the implications of the data for program administrators, teachers, and learners. Particular focus will be given to helping stakeholders understand specific changes that occurred in learners' fluency over the time period of three semesters.

AbstractAbstractAbstractAbstract This diploma thesis aims to contribute to the field of speaker recognition in the domain of temporal changes in the speech signal. After a brief introduction into forensic phonetics, it gives an outline of approaches and factors which help or hinder successful recognition. The focus is then shifted to the temporal structure of speech and approaches to its analysis currently in use. The practical section of this thesis consists of an experiment designed to assess the contribution of certain temporal measures to speaker recognition. The variables used here are %V (the proportion of vocalic intervals within a sentence), ΔV and ΔC (the standard deviation of the duration of vocalic/consonantal intervals within a sentence), VarcoV and VarcoC (the previous variables normalised for average interval duration) and the Pairwise Variability Indices, both vocalic and consonantal, raw and normalised. Beside these, another variable is used to capture the local articulation rate and especially final deceleration in the utterances - LAR (the inverse of the distance between successive midpoints of the vocalic intervals). Whereas the first mentioned variables are not very successful in distinguishing the speakers, LAR seems very well suited for capturing speaker idiosyncrasies, although...

Child-directed speech (CDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) in several respects whose possible facilitating effects for language acquisition are still being studied. One such difference concerns articulation rate --- the number of linguistic units by the number of time units, excluding pauses --- which has been shown to be generally lower than in ADS. However, while it is well-established that ADS exhibits an inverse relation between articulation rate and information-theoretic surprisal --- the amount of information encoded in a linguistic unit --- this measure has been conspicuously absent in the study of articulation rate in CDS. Another issue is if the lower articulation rate in CDS is stable across utterances or an effect of local variation, such as final lengthening. The aim of this work is to arrive at a more comprehensive model of articulation rate in CDS by including surprisal and final lengthening. In particular, one-word utterances were studied, also in relation to word-length effects (the phenomenon that longer words generally have a higher articulation rate). To this end, a methodology for large-scale automatic phoneme-alignment was developed, which was applied to two longitudinal corpora of Swedish CDS. It was investigated i) how articulation rate in CDS varied with respect to child age, ii) whether there was a negative relation between articulation rate and surprisal in CDS, and iii) to what extent articulation rate was lower in CDS than in ADS. The results showed i) a weak positive effectof child age on articulation rate, ii) a negative relation between articulation rate and surprisal, and iii) that there was a lower articulation rate in CDS but that the difference could almost exclusively be attributed to one-word utterances and final lengthening. In other words, adults seem to adapt how fast they speak to their children's age, speaking faster to children is correlated with a reduced amount of information, and the difference in articulation rate between CDS and ADS is most prominent in isolated words and final lengthening. More generally, the results suggest that CDS is well-suited for word segmentation, since lower articulation rate in one-word utterances provides an additional cue.

The diploma thesis deals with the issue of speech rate. The theoretical part briefly describes the investigation of speech tempo. It defines the types of tempo examined in this study (articulation rate and modified speaking rate) and factors that influence the tempo of speech. The practical part of the thesis aims to ascertain whether speech rate on the stage has increased and whether it is influenced by the type of text (monologue, dialogue, monological dialogue). The material consists of four theatre productions (Lakomec from 1972 and 2004 and Naši furianti from 1979 and 2006). Therefore we do not investigate gradual changes within the given periods, but instead compare two pairs of productions of the same dramatic text, realized with a time interval of approximately 30 years. A linear mixed-effects model was used as the main method for statistical evaluation of results gathered by measuring the speech rate. The results show that neither articulation rate nor modified speaking rate changed significantly in the observed productions. Differences with some statistical significance were obtained for comparison of tempo in texts of differing type, specifically in texts of different line lengths. The results relate especially to articulation rate, lesser to modified speaking rate.

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Information theoretical approaches to language state that the most efficient communication oc­curs when the amount of information transmitted is distributed as uniformly as possible over time. Previous research has shown that speakers tend to adhere to strategies for distributing information efficiently, using mechanisms at multiple linguistic levels. This study aims to in­vestigate whether articulation rate (AR) is used in continuous speech to achieve a more uniform distribution of information within sentences, quantified as surprisal estimated by the state­-of-­the-­art language model GPT-­2, and if this has an effect on the amplitude of the N400 brain response in listeners. In neurolinguistics, surprisal has been observed to be a good predictor of the N400, which is related to processing of semantics and meaning in general. The results showed a significant, though small, effect of surprisal on AR, indicating that AR may have some role in achieving more uniform distribution of information on the word level. In line with previous research, surprisal showed an effect on the N400 where higher surprisal led to larger amplitudes. Results regarding AR and distributional effects on the N400 were inconclusive, although some independent effects of AR were found that could be further explored in more controlled experimental settings. / Informationsteoretiska perspektiv på språk säger att den mest effektiva kommunikationen sker när information sänds ut så jämnt fördelat som möjligt över tid. Tidigare studier har visat att talare tenderar att följa vissa strategier för att distribuera information jämnt, vilket de gör på flera språkliga nivåer. Denna studie ämnar att undersöka om artikulationshastighet (eng. articulation rate (AR)) används i kontinuerligt tal för att uppnå en mer jämn distribution av information inom meningar, kvantifierat som informationsteoretisk surprisal med hjälp av språkmodellen GPT-­2, samt om detta ger effekt på hjärnresponsen N400:s amplitud hos lyssnare. Inom neurolingvistik har surprisal visats kunna predicera N400, som är kopplad till bearbetning av semantik och meningsfullhet generellt. Resultaten visade en signifikant, om än liten, effekt av surprisal på AR, en indikator på att AR kan ha en roll i att uppnå mer jämn distribution av information på ordnivå. I linje med tidigare forskning så hade surprisal en inverkan på N400, där högre surprisal gav större amplituder. Resultaten utifrån AR och distribution av information var inte entydiga, däremot observerades vissa självständiga effekter av AR på amplituden av N400 och dessa skulle kunna vidare undersökas i mer kontrollerade experiment.