Many phonetic studies have shown that changes in speech rate have numerous effects at various levels of the temporal structure. This observation is reinforced by a verification with speech synthesis. Changing the number of syllables per second is not a satisfactory manner of creating natural-sounding fast or slow synthetic speech. A systematic comparison of sentences read at two speech rates by a highly fluent French speaker allows a ranking of various mechanisms used to slow down speech. Pausing and producing additional syllables transform the phonological structure of utterances since they impede interlexical binding. It is claimed that knowing the degree of this interlexical binding allows a better characterisation of speech rate changes, and then a better generation of synthetic rhythms. Finally, the expected relationship between lengthening of speech units and pausing was not confirmed in our results. This suggests that the theory on slowing down speech needs revision.
Cite as: Zellner, B. (1998) Fast and slow speech rate: a characterisation for French. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0822, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-813
@inproceedings{zellner98_icslp,
author={Brigitte Zellner},
title={{Fast and slow speech rate: a characterisation for French}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0822},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-813}
}