Article published in:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 19:2 (2022) ► pp. 244–264

Spaniards articulate faster than Mexicans

Temporal patterns in two varieties of Spanish

| Université Paris 8
| Université de Lille

We analyse articulation rate and speech rate, number and duration of pauses for 22 speakers of two regional varieties of Spanish (Madrilenian vs Mexican) in three different tasks (reading, picture description and interview). Our results show that speakers from Madrid have higher articulation rate and speech rate than speakers from Mexico, but that such differences are mainly observed in spontaneous speech (picture description). Instead, the number and duration of pauses were not significantly affected by the origin of speakers. Some methodological issues are discussed in order to make legitimate inferences from this exploratory study.

Keywords: Madrilenian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, articulation rate
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work, goals, and research questions
    • 2.1Do Spaniards articulate faster than other Spanish speakers?
    • 2.2Goals and research questions
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpus, participants, and tasks
    • 3.2Transcription, annotation, and segmentation
    • 3.3Metrics for AR and SR
      • 3.3.1AR – articulation rate
      • 3.3.2SR – speech rate
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Statistical Analyses
    • 4.2Articulation rate
    • 4.3Speech rate
    • 4.3Pauses
  • 5.Discussion and general conclusion
  • References
Published online: 21 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.20013.san
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