Speech Rate Perception & Matching
People often unconsciously mirror aspects of the speech and gestures of the people they're in conversation with, for example by talking quieter or faster when their partner does -- but not necessarily when their partner's speech is unusual.
This project studies the relationship between the speech rates of interlocutors in laboratory tasks. First, preschoolers with cochlear implants (CI) who repeated sentences after an adult did not match the adult's speech rate as well as older children and those with typical hearing (TH). But communication is a two-way street, and CI users can't do all the work. Do TH adults reciprocate? What do people do in response to speakers with CIs and atypical speech rates (either fast or slow)? So far, no, and it doesn't seem to matter: adults don't change their speech rates no matter how fast, slow, or unintelligible the previous sentence is, or even if speech rate is pointed out to them as relevant. Maybe people need to be in dynamic conversation for the mirroring effect to work.
Papers and Presentations
- Freeman, V. (2018, November). Salience of cochlear implant users’ speech rate. Poster, Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Victoria, BC, Canada.
- Freeman, V. (2018, February). (The lack of) speech rate-matching to cochlear implant users. Friends of Oklahoma Language Sciences (FOOLS), Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK.
- Freeman, V. (2017, January). Speech rate, rate-matching, and intelligibility: Evidence from cochlear implant users. Poster, Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Austin, TX.
- Freeman, V., & Pisoni, D. (2017). Speech rate, speech rate-matching, and intelligibility in early-implanted cochlear implant users. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142(2), 1043–1054.
Students
- Christie Harris
- Abbie Kurszewski
- Molly Landers
- Heather Morrison
Student Corner
Data and Materials
- Audio clips of sentences read by cochlear implant users and peers with typical hearing (preschool, child, teen, adult -- see Impressions of CI User Speech page for details)
- Intelligibility ratings and calculated speech rates (speaking rate and articulation
rate) for each sentence and speaker
- Correlations between child speech rates and rates of the adults they shadowed instead of reading (see 2017 article)
- Audio clips of adults (mostly college students) reading sentences after hearing different sentences, and reading sentences and passages in isolation
- Passages read by adults that have been sped up or slowed down by 10-25%
- Listeners' subjective speech rate ratings of sentences and speakers
- Calculated speech rates from participants, correlations between heard and read rates
- Experiment files (PsychoPy, AppleScript), consent, flyers, IRB forms, etc.
- Speaker and participant demographics
Project Ideas
- Conduct an experiment that is or appears to be dynamic with a live person (e.g. play recordings over "phone")
- Examine/manipulate interactions with intelligibility
- Degrade stimuli to increase listening effort (and decrease intelligibility)
- Give more information about the speakers to manipulate listeners' sympathy/affinity
- Examine rate-matching in more natural/conversational recordings