This is a report of some of our findings from studies of temporal structure in prose reading, essentially confined to Swedish. Our major effort has been to study durations of speech sounds, syllables, stress groups and pauses with respect to specific modes of performance with an emphasis on high quality reading. Earlier work along these lines have been followed up by a language contrastive study and also a study of poetry reading. Speaking and reading style and their major categories such as relative distinctiveness are multidimensional. Temporal variations of FO, intensity and coarticulation are obvious components but will not be treated here. We shall focus on durational patterns and their variations with reading mode and overall speech rate, including short time tempo variations. Durational patterns are determined by phonetic and linguistic structures and speaker specific, semantic and pragmatic denotations and speaking style. A fundamental distinction is that between stressed and unstressed syllables. In a stress-timed language like Swedish or English it is important to retain a sufficient contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables. An increased stressed/unstressed contrast tends to emphasize content words, which adds to distinctiveness and constitutes a basic parameter of individual speaking style. Of special interest is the role of pauses in variations of overall speech rate and relations between speech rate and stress patterns.
Cite as: Fant, G., Kruckenberg, A., Nord, L. (1991) Some observations on tempo and speaking style in Swedish text reading. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles, paper 023
@inproceedings{fant91_ppst,
author={Gunnar Fant and Anita Kruckenberg and Lennart Nord},
title={{Some observations on tempo and speaking style in Swedish text reading}},
year=1991,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles},
pages={paper 023}
}