Jana Dankovicova - 'The linguistic basis of articulation rate variation in Czech" (1998) - abstract of the Ph.D. thesis

The thesis presents an experimental phonetic investigation of variation in articulation rate in Czech. It reports on two studies. In the first study, I investigated whether variation in articulation rate has a specific domain in elicited spontaneous Czech speech. Three types of unit were examined as candidate domains: the interpause stretch, the intonation phrase and the clause. Articulation rate within these units was measured for each (phonological) word. The analysis showed that articulation rate was not constant in any of these candidate domains. However, a regular pattern was found within the intonation phrase, consisting of a slowing down (rallentando) with the first or the second word being the fastest in the majority of intonation phrases. Although phrase-final lengthening contributes to the decrease at the end of the intonation phrase, other factors contribute to the overall pattern. As one possible determinant of articulation rate, the word size was considered. A statistically significant tendency was found for the articulation rate of the word to increase with its size, expressed in the number of syllables. The hypothesis that the interpause stretch and/or clause might constitute hierarchically higher domains of variation in articulation rate was not confirmed. However, some evidence was found for the interpause stretch as a superordinate domain of phrase-final lengthening.

In the second study, a tendency of the articulation rate to decrease throughout the intonation phrase was tested statistically, using a considerably larger database, including three different tasks: reading a story, paraphrasing the story and elicited spontaneous speech. The rallentando pattern was confirmed for all three tasks. Moreover, a high correlation between speakers was obtained for the articulation rate of individual words when speakers were reading the same text. In the investigation of possible determinants of the word’s articulation rate, the same tendency as in Study 1 was observed for word size in syllables. In addition, I found a tendency for phonological words containing only function words to be significantly faster than phonological words containing only content words. The finding of a significant effect of word size and word class on the articulation rate of words is in accord with the results reported in the literature for other languages.

Finally, a mathematical model was designed to estimate and predict articulation rate on the basis of three variables: position of the word within the intonation phrase, its size in syllables and word class.

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