Cover not available
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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.20013.san
References
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker, and Steve Walker
2015 “Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4.” Journal of Statistical Software 67 (1): 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Block, Susan, and Deanne Killen
1996 “Speech Rates of Australian English-Speaking Children and Adults.” Australian Journal of Human Communication Disorders 24 (1): 39–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink
2020 “Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program].” Version 6.1.09, retrieved 01 January 2018 from [URL]
Butcher, Andy
1981 Aspects of the speech pause: Phonetic correlates and communicative functions. Kiel: Institut fur Phonetik der Universitat Kiel.Google Scholar
Byrd, Dani
1994 “Relations of Sex and Dialect to Reduction.” Speech Communication 151: 39–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chan, Dominique, Adrian Fourcin, Dafydd Gibbon, Bjorn Granstrom, Mark Huckvale, George Kokkinakis, Knut Kvale, Lori Lamel, Borge Linderg, et al
1995 “EUROM-a spoken language resource for the EU.” Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Speech Communication and Speech Technology, vol. 11: 867–870. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chon, HeeCheong, Jean Sawyer, and Nicoline G. Ambrose
2012 “Differences of Articulation Rate and Utterance Length in Fluent and Disfluent Utterances of Preschool Children who Stutter.” Journal of Communication Disorders 451: 455–467. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., and Rajka Smiljanic
2011 “Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English.” Journal of Phonetics 391: 237–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cosyns, Marjan, Myriam Meulemans, Ellen Vermeulen, Lauranne Busschots, Paul Corthals, and John Van Borsel
2018 “Measuring Articulation Rate: A Comparison of Two Methods.” Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 611: 2772–2778. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dauer, Rebecca. M.
1983 “Stress-timing and Syllable-timing Reanalysed.” Journal of Phonetics 111: 51–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duchin, Sandra W., and Edward D. Mysak
1987 “Disfluency and rate characteristics of young adult, middle-aged, and older males.” Journal of Communication Disorders 20 (3): 245–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fletcher, Janet
2010 “The Prosody of Speech: Timing and Rhythm.” In The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, ed. by William J. Hardcastle, John Laver, and Fiona F. Gibbon, 257–273. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gerstenberg, Anette, Susanne Fuchs, Julie M. Kairet, Claudia Frankenberg, and Johannes Schröder
2018 “A Cross-Linguistic, Longitudinal Case Study of Pauses and Interpausal Units in Spontaneous Speech Corpora of Older Speakers of German and French.” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, 211–215. Poznan, Poland. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Jean-Philippe
2011 “EasyAlign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat.” Proceedings of InterSpeech 2011. Firenze, Italy. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th
2015 “The most under-used statistical method in corpus linguistics: Multi-level (and mixed-effects) models.” Corpora 10 (1): 95–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François
1980 “Comparative studies of temporal variables in spoken and sign languages: A short review.” In Temporal Variables in Speech: Studies in Honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler, ed. by Hans Dechert, and Manfred Raupach, 307–12. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François, and Alain Deschamps
1975 “Analyse contrastive des variables temporelles de l’anglais et du français: vitesse de parole et variables composantes, phénomènes d’hésitation.” Phonetica 311: 144–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hnath-Chisolm, Theresa, James F. Willott, and Jennifer J. Lister
2003 “The Aging Auditory System: Anatomic and Physiologic Changes and Implications for Rehabilitation.” International Journal of Audiology 421: 2S3–SS10.Google Scholar
Hualde, José-Ignacio
2014 Los sonidos del español. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacewicz, Ewa, Robert A. Fox, Caitilin O’Neill, and Joseph Salmons
2009 “Articulation Rate across Dialect, Age, and Gender.” Language variation and change 21 (2): 233–256. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacewicz, Ewa, Robert A. Fox, and Lai Wei
2010 “Between-Speaker and Within-Speaker Variation in Speech Tempo of American English.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128 (2): 839–850. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Jungsun
2018 “Effects of Gender, Age, and Individual speakers on articulation rate in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech.” Phonetics Speech Sci 10 (4): 19–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Per B. Brockhoff, and Rune H. B. Christensen
2017 “lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models.” Journal of Statistical Software 82 (13): 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Alice, and Rachel Dorety
2017 “Speaking Rate and Articulation Rate of Native Speakers of Irish English.” Speech, Language and Hearing 20 (4): 206–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leemann, Adrian
2012 Swiss German Intonation Patterns. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Madrid, Edgar
2008 “Hacia el establecimiento de unidades para la medición de la velocidad de habla. El caso del español.” In Fonología instrumental. Patrones fónicos y variación, ed. by Esther Herrera, and Pedro Martín-Butragueño, 257–273. México: El Colegio de México.Google Scholar
Owren, Michael J., and Gina C. Carrillo
2006 “The Relative Roles of Vowels and Consonants in Discriminating Talker Identity versus Word Meaning.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (3):1727–1739. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pellegrino, François, Christophe Coupé, and Egidio Marsico
2011 “A Cross-Language perspective on speech information rate.” Language 87 (3): 539–558. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quené, Hugo
2008 “Multilevel modelling of between-speaker and within-speaker variation in spontaneous speech tempo.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123 (2): 1104–1113. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
2019 “R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.” Retrieved from [URL]
Robb, Michael, Margaret A. Maclagan, and Yang Chen
2004 “Speaking Rates of American and New Zealand Varieties of English.” Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 181: 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rodero, Emma
2012 “A Comparative Analysis of Speech Rate and Perception in Radio Bulletins.” Text & Talk 32 (3): 391–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwab, Sandra
2015 “Las variables temporales en el español de Costa Rica y de España: un estudio comparativo.” Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 44 (1): 127–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwab, Sandra, and Mathieu Avanzi
2015 “Regional Variation and Articulation Rate in French.” Journal of Phonetics 481: 96–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stepanova, Svetlana
2011 “Russian Spontaneous Speech Rate: Based on the Speech Corpus of Russian Everyday Interaction.” Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. by Wai S. Lee, and Eric Zee, 1902–1905. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Trouvain, Jürgen
2004 “Tempo variation in speech production: Implications for speech synthesis.” PhD diss., Saarland University.
Ulbrich, Christiane
2005 Phonetische Untersuchungen zur Prosodie der Standardvarietäten des Deutschen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in der Schweiz und in Österreich. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Jo, Guy de Pauw, and Hanne Kloots
2004 “Speech Rate in a Pluricentric Language: A Comparaison Between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands.” Language and Speech 47 (3): 297–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Petra, Jürgen Trouvain, and Frank Zimmerer
2015 “In defense of stylistic diversity in speech research.” Journal of Phonetics 481: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar