Keywords: adolescent speech tempo, speaking rate, articulation rate, phone rate, syllable structures, syllable duration, speech motor development
The paper explores the developmental changes of speech tempo and syllable durations in Estonian adolescent speech depending on age, gender and text characteristics. The research material consists of read speech utterances from 175 girls and 134 boys in the age range of 10 to 18 years. For each sentence, the speech rate, articulation rate and phone rates were calculated. Generalized additive mixed models (GAMM) were applied to analyze the variations in the measures of speech tempo and syllable durations.
The effect of age on the speech tempo is obvious: speech rate increases from 4 syllables per second in 9–10 years to 5.1 syllables per second in 14 years and becomes stable between the ages of 15 and 18. Similar developmental patterns are observed for articulation and phone rates. Gender differences are not significant in all tempo measures, although boys tend to speak slightly faster than girls. The duration of syllables has an inverse pattern decreasing from 9 to 14 years and remaining stable in 15–18 years. Interpreting the data on speech tempo and syllable durations as the indicators of speech motor development we can conclude that in Estonian children the development of speech motor skills reaches stability at the age of 14 and the refinement of articulatory skills continues at the age of 15–18.
The findings are in line with the results reported for adolescent speech in other languages. The reported results can be considered reference data that are typical for Estonian-speaking subjects aged from 10 to 18 with normal linguistic development.
Einar Meister (b. 1957), PhD, Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Software Science, Senior Researcher (Akadeemia tee 15a, 12618 Tallinn), firstname.lastname@example.org
Lya Meister (b. 1957), PhD, Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Software Science, Researcher (Akadeemia tee 15a, 12618 Tallinn), email@example.com