The purpose of this study was to examine a large normally speaking population of young black college students in order to determine the durational characteristics of speaking and reading. Further, it was the purpose of this study to make an extensive comparison of the results of Walker's (1979) study of young white college students and the results of the current investigation. / In order to accomplish the goals of this research, the exact instrumentation, method and procedure reported by Walker (1979) were employed. Normative data were reported on the five following speech durations: (1) Total speaking time which represented the total time necessary for the production of the message. (2) Articulation time which was the total speaking time exclusive of the pauses. (3) Phonation time which was the time that the vocal folds were active in the production of voice. (4) Voiceless speech which was the amount of time spent in voiceless articulation. (5) Pause time which was the amount of time in a message when no acoustic signal was present. / A total of 120 Native Black American college students served as subjects for this study. These subjects were undergraduate students enrolled at Florida A&M University and The Florida State University; 60 were males, and 60 were females. All subjects used in this study were judged to be normal with respect to speech, voice and hearing, and they had no formal voice training. / Three tasks were required of each subject. These tasks were to read a standard passage, to converse with the experimenter for three minutes and to read the written text of their conversational speech. / In addition to providing descriptive data concerning the performances of the three tasks in terms of durations, rates, percentages, and ratios for all subjects by race and sex, the following statistical tests were utilized: analysis of variance, t test, Newman-Keuls Multiple Range Test and the Pearson Product Moment Correlation. / The results indicated that there was a significant difference among the four groups of subjects for all measures except total rate of conversational speech and the reading of the conversational speech passage. The black male subjects and the white male subjects were similar on all measures. The black female subjects had the lowest rate of speaking and reading and the least pause time. The white females had the highest rate of speaking and reading and they had the greatest pause time. For all subjects, total speaking and articulation rates for conversational speech were slower than the same measures and the same material in the reading of the conversational speech sample. The total rates and the articulation rates for the reading of the conversational speech sample were significantly higher than the reading and articulation rates for the reading of the standard passage. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2366. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74516 |
| Contributors | PAYNE, JOHN ALFRED., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 149 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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