Speech Rates in British English

Recycling utterances: A speaker's guide to sentence processing

“…Adult speakers have experienced vast amounts of language. In ordinary conversation, speakers produce about 210 words per minute (Tauroza and Allison 1990). Assuming 6 hours of exposure to language per day, adult language users experience over half a million words (210×60×6×7=529,200) every week of their lives.…”

“…In ordinary conversation, English-speaking adults produce, on average, 210 words per minute (Tauroza and Allison 1990); the average gap between turns is about 500 msec (Bull and Aylett 1998). Thus, within half of a second of the first speaker finishing her turn, the interlocutor has interpreted the speakers' utterance, decided on an appropriate response, formulated it, and launched an appropriate motor programme to begin his own contribution.…”

Effects of the Rate of Formant-Frequency Variation on the Grouping of Formants in Speech Perception

“…One dynamic property of speech that merits consideration is the rate of formant-frequency variation. Speech rate varies considerably; according to estimates of standard rates of speech by Tauroza and Allison (1990), the rate for slow speech is typically below 3.17 syllables/s and for fast speech it is above 5.33 syllables/s. As discussed in more detail below, changes in the rate of speech are commonly accompanied by changes in the rate of formant-frequency variation (e.g., Weismer and Berry 2003).…”

Issues in lecturing in a second language: lecturer’s behaviour and students’ perceptions

“…Lecturing in a second language is now being taken seriously as an area of research (e.g. Griffiths, 1989;Tauroza & Allison, 1990;Flowerdew & Miller, 1997;Klaassen 748 L. Miller & Snippe, 1999;Major et al, 2002;, Miller, 2002;Vidal, 2003;Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005), the results of which will, hopefully, lead to content material becoming more comprehensible to the non-native English speaking students.…”