Job Discussion Forums

[wuzza]

I apologize if this is the wrong place for this, but I really need some hard facts on this subject.

If someone could direct me to a site with some details, that would be most appreciated.

Basically, I want to know "how fast" different languages are spoken, and how they compare to each other, for example in "syllables per minute" of their normal spoken conversation.

thanks in advance.

Eoin

[Stephen Jones]

Individual speaker variation is likely to be such that it would make it hard to collect data.
And there are regional variations. English spoken in the Deep South of the USA is probably spoken a lot slower than the same language in New York.
And then there is the question of the amount of information conveyed by each syllable. Languages with a lot of redundancy can probalby be spoken a lot faster than those with less redundancy.
And a rhythmic language such as English can be spoken faster than a flat language such as French.

[guty]

You will probably find a close relation to national reading speeds.
And of course those languages which have faster speaking rates will also top the national listening speed averages.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[Zero Hero]

God knows what relation there would be to 'reading speeds'.

Regardless of the language, the typical rate of production is around 10-15 phonemes per second.

[wuzza]

yes, I realise that such a study would be very hard to do.

Nonetheless, I am sure in the past that someone told me of such a study, I think using it as "proof" that Korean was 6 times faster than English (or some other such nonsense) and I've been trying to find actual evidence to back this up.

Regardless of the difficulty of such an experiment, someone somewhere sometime must have done it, and even if it is inherently flawed, I would still like to take a look at it.

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Try this:

http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/tempopr.htm

[Zero Hero]

'Wuzza', there is a whole literature on this area, to which I can supply references if you like. However, most, if not all, of this body of literature will be wholly inaccessible to anyone other than a professionally trained linguist, in fact, a psycholinguist.

[poro]