This paper deals with how speech rate in Korean is affected by the sociolinguistic factors such as region, gender and generation. Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate (excluding physical pauses) and speaking rate (including physical pauses), both expressed as the number of syllables per second (sps). Other acoustic measures such as pause frequency and duration were also examined. Four hundred twelve subjects were chosen from Korean Standard Speech Database considering their age, gender and region. The result shows that generation has a significant effect on both speaking rate and articulation rate. Younger speakers produce their speech with significantly faster speaking rate and articulation rate than older speakers. Mean duration of total pause interval and the total number of pause of older speakers are also significantly different to those of younger speakers. Gender has a significant effect only on articulation rate, which means male speakers' speech rate is characterized by faster articulation rate, longer and more frequent pauses. Finally, region has no effect both on speaking and articulation rates.

This paper dealt with how realization of pauses in utterance is affected by speech style, gender, and generation. For this purpose, we analyzed the frequency and duration of pauses. Pauses were categorized into four types: pause with breath, pause with no breath, utterance medial pause, and utterance final pause. Forty-eight subjects living in Seoul were chosen from the Korean Standard Speech Database. All subjects engaged in reading and spontaneous speech, through which we could also compare the realization between the two speech styles. The results showed that utterance final pauses had longer durations than utterance medial pauses. It means that utterance final pause has a function that signals the end of an utterance to the audience. For difference between tasks, spontaneous speech had longer and more frequent pauses because of cognitive reasons. With regard to gender variables, women produced shorter and less frequent pauses. For male speakers, the duration of pauses with breath was significantly longer. Finally, for generation variable, older speakers produced more frequent pauses. In addition, the results showed several interaction effects. Male speakers produced longer pauses, but this gender effect was more prominent at the utterance final position.

The purpose of this study is to observe the realization of pause and breath groups from adult speakers and to examine how gender, generation, and tasks can affect this realization. For this purpose, we analyzed forty-eight male or female speakers. Their generation was divided into two groups: young, old. Task and gender affected both the realization of pause and breath groups. The length of the pause groups was longer in the read speech than in the spontaneous speech and female speech. On the other hand, the length of the breath group was longer in the spontaneous speech and the male speech. In the spontaneous speech, which requires planning, the speaker produced shorter length of pause group. The short sentence length of the reading material influenced the reason for which the length of the breath group was shorter in the reading speech. Gender difference resulted from difference in pause patterns between genders. In the case of the breath groups, the male speaker produced longer duration of pause than the female speaker did, which may be due to difference in lung capacity between genders. On the other hand, generation did not affect either the pause groups or the breath groups. The generation factor only influenced the number of syllables and the eojeols, which can be interpreted as the result of the difference in speech rate between generations.