Speech Rate in a Pluricentric Language

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Speech Rate in a Pluricentric Language: A Comparison Between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands Jo Verhoeven, Guy De Pauw and Hanne Kloots Language and Speech 2004 47: 297 DOI: 10.1177/00238309040470030401 The online version of this article can be found at: http://las.sagepub.com/content/47/3/297

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LANGUAGE J. Verhoeven, AND SPEECH, G. 2004, de Pauw, 47 and (3), 297 H. Kloots – 308

297

Speech Rate in a Pluricentric Language: A Comparison Between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands Jo Verhoeven, Guy De Pauw, and Hanne Kloots University of Antwerp

Key words

Abstract

This paper investigates speech rate in two standard national varieties of Dutch on the basis of 160 15 mins conversations with native speakers who belong to four different regions in the Netherlands and four in the Dutch-speaking pluricentric part of Belgium (Flanders). Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate languages and speaking rate, both expressed as the number of syllables per second (syll/s). The results show a significant effect of speakers’ country of origin: prosody subjects in the Netherlands speak 16% faster than subjects in Belgium (articulation: 5.05 vs. 4.23 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.00 syll/s). In addispeaking rate tion, the independent variable sex was also found to be significant: on average, men speak 6% faster than women (articulation: 4.79 vs. 4.50 syll/s, speech rate speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.01 syll/s). The independent variable age was significant too: younger subjects speak 5% faster than older ones (articulation: 4.78 vs. 4.52 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.01 syll/s). The findings of this study confirm the traditional view that speech rate is determined by extralinguistic variables, but also suggest that there may be intrinsic tempo differences between language varieties.

articulation rate

1 Introduction The temporal organization of speech is characterized by variations in continuity (silent pauses) and variations in speed (rate of speech). Speech rate has been investigated in a wide variety of languages with very different results. At present, however, it is not clear whether there are inherent differences in the tempo of languages. This study was specifically undertaken to investigate whether language varieties may differ intrinsically in speech rate in order to contribute to the more general question whether speech tempo is part of the linguistic structure of languages.

Acknowledgments: Hanne Kloots holds a research assistantship from the Fund for Scientific Research — Flanders. We would like to thank Anne Cutler, Mirjam Ernestus and Nigel Hewlett for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Any shortcomings, however, remain our own. Address for correspondence. University of Antwerp, Campus Drie Eiken, Department of Linguistics, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium; e-mail:< [email protected]>. ‘Language and Speech’ is © Kingston Press Ltd. 1958 – 2004 Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

Language and Speech

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Dutch speech rate and regional accent

Research over the past decades has centered around two main issues. On the one hand it has been investigated to what extent speech rate is determined by nonlinguistic factors. Studies have shown that men speak faster than women (Whiteside, 1996) and that the elderly speak more slowly than youngsters (Duchin & Mysak, 1987; Malécot, Johnston, & Kizziar, 1972; Ramig, 1983). Other nonlinguistic factors determining speech rate are as diverse as the speaker’s profession (Malécot et al., 1972) and emotional state (Hausner, 1987): People in higher-ranking professions speak more slowly than those in lower-ranking professions and increasing stress levels are related to faster speech. On the other hand, it has been shown that there are quite substantial differences in speech rate between languages. Average articulation rates in British English for instance vary between 3.16 and 5.33 syll/s (Tauroza & Allison, 1990). Mean articulation rate in French ranges between 4.31 syll/s (Grosjean & Deschamps, 1973) and 5.73 syll/s (Malécot, Johnston, Kizziar, 1972). In Northern Standard Dutch, average articulation rate is 5.2 syll/s (Blaauw, 1995), while that of Norwegian ranges between 3.5 and 4.5 syll/s (Almberg, 2000). Articulation rates for Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish are higher with 6.57 syll/s and 7.81 syll/s respectively (Rebollo Couto, 1997). These differences seem to suggest that speech rate is a factor of the linguistic background of speakers. This relationship between speech rate and the native language of speakers has been investigated by comparing speech rate in different languages: Osser & Peng (1964) for instance studied tempo in American English and Japanese and did not find any significant differences between the two. The comparison of structurally different languages, however, is problematic. Some languages for instance have typically longer words or syllables than others. When speech rate is expressed as the number of “words per minute” or “syllables per second,” the measures will reflect these structural differences, and a language with long words or syllables will necessarily have a lower speech rate measure than a language with short words or syllables. The problematic interaction between speech rate and structural differences between languages is largely eliminated by comparing regional varieties of the same language. Such comparisons have been made for different regions in the United States (Byrd, 1992; Ray & Zahn, 1990), Norway (Almberg, 2000) and Scotland (Hewlett & Rendall, 1998). The results of these studies generally did not reveal a significant influence of regional accent on speech rate. Although this suggests that that speech rate does not vary a great deal within the same standard language, these results do not enable firm conclusions to be drawn about the relationship between speech rate and the linguistic background of speakers since the linguistic background of the speakers in the above-mentioned studies may simply have been too similar. In this investigation, a new dimension to the study of speech rate will be added by comparing speech rate in different varieties of a pluricentric language. Pluricentric languages are “languages with several interacting centers, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) norms. Pluricentric languages are both unifiers and dividers of people” (Clyne, 1992, p. 1). This approach overcomes some of the problems associated with the other methods discussed earlier. On the one hand, it eliminates structural differences between languages in the comparison of speech rate. Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

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On the other hand, it ascertains that the speakers of the different national varieties identify with different norms and linguistic variables. The language chosen for this study was Dutch, which has been described explicitly as an example of a pluricentric language (Deprez, 1997; Geerts, 1992). This language has two national varieties, one of which is spoken in the Netherlands while the other is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders). The phonetic characteristics of both national varieties have been well documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999) for Dutch in the Netherlands and Verhoeven (2002) and Verhoeven (forthcoming) for Belgian Dutch. Since there are no substantial structural differences between both varieties, it is possible to compute speech rate values that can be reliably compared. In addition, the differences in norms and values between the two national varieties are widely regarded as substantial enough to provide an interesting starting point for investigating the relationship between speech rate and the linguistic background of speakers.1 As to the outcome of the speech rate comparison in Belgium and the Netherlands, our own perceptual impressions lead us to expect that the variety of Dutch spoken in the Netherlands has a substantially higher speech rate than the variety spoken in Belgium. In line with previous studies on the influence of geographical region it can be hypothesized that there are no significant differences between the regions within each country. However, a significant influence is expected of the extralinguistic variables sex and age, in that men speak faster than women and younger people have a higher speech rate than older people.

2 Data collection In this study, speech rates were calculated for spontaneous speech samples of 160 native speakers of Dutch who had participated in a substantial data collection exercise in the context of an interuniversity research project between the universities of Antwerp (Belgium) and Nijmegen (the Netherlands). The main aim of this project was to describe pronunciation variation in Standard Dutch (Van Hout et al. 1999). The data that were collected in this project have now also been integrated in the Corpus of Spoken Dutch.2

1

Speech rate has been studied before in a pluricentric language situation by Moreau & Brichard (1999) who have compared verbal fluency strategies in two national varieties of French, that is, in France and in Belgium. They found systematic differences between the two varieties in terms of the duration of silent and filled pauses, the use of hesitation markers, repetitions, and so forth. This study also investigated speech rate but the reported values are very confusing in that there is no indication at all of how speech rate had been calculated. The absence of statistical testing makes the results impossible to interpret.

2

The Corpus of Spoken Dutch is a database of contemporary Standard Dutch as spoken by adults in the Netherlands and Flanders. In total the corpus contains approximately 10 million words or the equivalent of 1000 hours of speech. More information about this corpus is found on . Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

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2.1 Informant characteristics

All subjects were professional teachers of Dutch who were born and bred in the regions for which they acted as representatives. The total number of informants was 160, that is, 5 informants × 2 sexes (male vs. female) × 2 ages ( < 40 versus > 45 years of age) × 2 countries (the Netherlands vs. Belgium) × 4 regions (Center, Transition, Periphery 1 and Periphery 2). The central region covered the areas of Randstad in the Netherlands and Brabant in Belgium. The transition zone consisted of the regions Utrecht / Gelderland in the Netherlands and the province of East Flanders in Belgium. The region of Groningen / Drenthe in the Netherlands and the province of West Flanders in Belgium constituted the first peripheral area, while the second peripheral area was made up of the Limburg provinces in the Netherlands and Belgium. The informants were teachers of Dutch in secondary schools of major towns in the different geographical areas. The regions and cities in the study are illustrated in Figure 1:

Figure 1 Map of the Dutch-speaking language area in the Netherlands and the northern part of Belgium (Flanders). In each country, four regions were selected

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In contrast to the previous studies on the influence of region on speech rate, the regions in this study were not defined purely geographically but in terms of their linguistic, socioeconomic, demographic and cultural characteristics. The central regions are the densely-populated economic and cultural centers of the Netherlands and Flanders which are also linguistically dominant. In the peripheral areas, there is a comparatively large linguistic and geographical distance from the central regions and dialects still occupy a relatively strong position. The transition zones occupy an intermediary position between the center and the peripheral areas both demographically and linguistically. 2.2 Speech sample

The speech rate values in this study are based on the spontaneous speech of the 160 informants. These data were collected in 1999. In each recording session informants were required to speak freely about general topics such as current affairs, education, hobbies and holidays. The “interviews” were conducted by two project assistants who spoke Standard Dutch: they were explicitly instructed to interfere as little as possible with informants’ spontaneous speech by, for instance, only introducing a new topic of conversation when informants ran out of something to say. Thus, they only fulfilled a prompting function rather than acting as a real interviewer. Each interview lasted at least 15 mins. 2.3 Procedure

The interviews were conducted in quiet rooms without disturbing background noise. During interviews, only the informant and the interviewer were present. The interviews were recorded on a portable DAT-recorder (Tascam DA-P1) with an AKG-C420 headset condenser microphone. Afterwards, the interviews were digitized and downsampled to 16 kHz (16 bits).

3 Analysis 3.1 Calculation of speech rate

The interviews were transcribed orthographically. The transcripts conformed to a large extent to the spelling conventions of Standard Dutch (Goedertier & Goddijn, 2000). In order to establish speech rate in the corpus, two measures were calculated: speaking rate and articulation rate. In accordance to Laver (1994) speaking rate was defined as the number of syllables per second including filled and silent pauses. Speaking rate was also expressed as the number of syllables per second, but this value excluded silent pauses while filled pauses were included. It was considered appropriate to choose the syllable as a unit to express speech rate since this investigation compares two national varieties of the same language and there are no differences in syllable structure between the two varieties. As a first step in the calculation of speaking rate and articulation rate the total number of syllables was established for the participants in each interview. This was Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

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achieved by means of an implicit syllabification script which counted the number of vowels per word on the assumption that each syllable must contain a vowel. In addition to the total number of syllables, the script also determined total elapsed time as well as the duration of silent intervals which was necessary to properly compute articulation rate, since this metric expresses the number of syllables per second excluding silent pauses. Speaking rate and articulation rate were calculated for 10 equal time intervals in each interview. Subsequently, it was investigated whether these measures of articulation rate and speaking rate were different over time by means of an analysis of variance with the time interval as the independent variable and articulation rate as the dependent variable. The analysis was not significant, F (9, 1590) = 0.8850, p = .5379. A similar analysis with speaking rate as an independent variable was not significant either, F (9, 1590) = 1.89199, p = .0603. Due to the lack of significance of the two measures of speech rate across the different time intervals, it was decided to calculate one value for articulation rate and one value for speaking rate for each interview as a whole. These values were analyzed in more detail.

4 Results The total amount of speech collected (silent and filled pauses inclusive) during the interviews was 44.60 hours or about 500,000 words. The Belgian regions were somewhat better represented than the Netherlands regions (24.96 hours vs. 19.64 hours), there was almost as much speech from women as from men (22.70 hours vs. 21.89 hours) and there was marginally more speech from older speakers (22.88 hours vs. 21.72 hours). The silent pauses took up 4.48 hours. 4.1 Articulation and speaking rate

The independent variables in the experiment were country, informants’ regional affiliation, sex and age. The significance of these variables was analyzed by means of a four-way analysis of variance. In the first analysis, the dependent variable was articulation rate in syllables per second. This value included filled pauses, but excluded silent pauses. The analysis of variance shows a significant main effect of the independent variables country, F (1, 1) = 155.51, p < .0001; region, F (1, 3) = 3.1428, p = .0276; sex, F (1, 1) = 19.6557, p < .0001; and age, F (1, 1) = 15.3988, p < .0001. In addition, a significant two-way interaction was found between country and region, F (1, 3) = 6.3951, p = .0005. None of the other interactions was significant. Average articulation rates in the different regions of the two countries are given in Table 1. Mean articulation rate in the Netherlands is 5.05 syll/s while it amounts to 4.23 syll/s in Belgium. In addition, men speak significantly faster than women (4.79 vs. 4.50 syll/s). Mean articulation rate for young speakers is 4.78 syll/s while that for older speakers is 4.52 syll/s. A pairwise comparison of articulation rates between the regions in each of the two countries by means of a contrast analysis reveals no significant differences between the Belgian regions. In the Netherlands it is only the Randstad region which differs significantly from all the other regions. The significant interaction between country Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013


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and region is explained by the fact that the central region in the Netherlands has the highest speech rate, while the Belgian central region has a very slow speech rate. TABLE 1 Mean articulation rate (syll/s, excluding silent pauses) and speaking rate (syll/s, including silent pauses) in the different geographical regions in the Netherlands and Belgium. Speech rates are ranked from fastest (top) to slowest (bottom) Rank order

Articulation rate

Rank order

Speaking rate

NL-Randstad

5.42

NL-Randstad

4.35

NL-Gro. /Drenthe

4.96

NL-Gro. /Drenthe

4.28

NL-Utrecht / Gelderl.

4.92

NL-Limburg

4.19

NL-Limburg

4.89

NL-Utrecht / Gelderl.

4.10

BE-East Flanders

4.43

BE-East Flanders

4.10

BE-West Flanders

4.25

BE-Brabant

3.98

BE-Brabant

4.15

BE-West Flanders

3.93

BE-Limburg

4.14

BE-Limburg

3.91

In the second analysis the dependent variable was speaking rate expressed as the number of syllables per second. This value included both silent and filled pauses. The statistical analysis of speaking rate shows a significant effect of country, F (1, 1) = 11.0486, p = .0012; sex, F (1, 1) = 10.6766, p = .0014; and age, F (1, 1) = 10.6585, p = .0014. There was no significant effect of region, nor were any of the higher order interactions significant. Speaking rates in the different regions are summarized in Table 1. Mean speaking rate in the Netherlands is 4.23 syll/s, while that in Belgium amounts to 4.00 syll/s. Women speak significantly more slowly than men (4.01 syll/s vs. 4.23 syll/s) and young speakers speak faster than older speakers (4.23 syll/s vs. 4.01 syll/s).

5 Discussion The main objective of this paper was to investigate the relationship between speech rate and the linguistic background of speakers. In addition, the effects of the extralinguistic variables sex and age were also examined. Speech rate was defined both as articulation rate (speech delivery excluding silent pauses) and speaking rate (speech delivery including silent pauses). Average articulation rate for the whole corpus was 4.63 syllables per second, that is, 5.05 syll/s for the Netherlands regions and 4.23 syll/s for Belgian regions. The value for the Netherlands compares extremely well with that of 5.2 syll/s reported in Blaauw (1995) who also investigated speech rate in the Netherlands as part of a bigger study on the prosody of speech. Statistical analysis showed that the difference in speech rate between Belgium and the Netherlands is significant: all regions in the Netherlands have a faster speech rate than the Belgian regions. While the factor region Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

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also came out significant, a contrast analysis indicated that within Belgium the differences in speech rate between the four regions are in fact not significant. In the Netherlands, it is only the central region (Randstad) where speech rate is significantly faster than in the other regions. Average speaking rate in the corpus is generally somewhat lower than articulation rate since this metric includes silent pauses. For the whole corpus mean speaking rate was 4.10 syll/s, that is, 4.23 syll/s in the Netherlands and 3.98 syll/s in Belgium. Although silent pauses were included in the measure of speaking rate, it mirrors to a large extent the results for articulation rate in that the difference between the two countries is significant. However, there is no significant effect of the regions within each country. The results of this investigation confirm our perceptual impressions that speech rate in the Netherlands is significantly faster than in Belgium. It should be noted that besides the statistical significance of this result, the faster speech rate in the Netherlands is highly consistent in that it applies to all regions, both age groups and both sexes. The initial hypothesis that there are no significant differences between the regions within each country is to a large extent confirmed: It is only the central region in the Netherlands which differs significantly from all the other regions within this country. Taken together, both observations suggest that the observed differences in speech rate may have something to do with the linguistic background of the speakers:3 both national varieties of Dutch seem to have their own inherent tempo. The difference in speech rate between Belgium and the Netherlands can be accounted for by an interaction of several factors which are essentially related to the distance between everyday language use and the standard language in both countries. Historically, the difference between everyday language use and the standard language has always been bigger in Belgium than in the Netherlands (Geeraerts, 2001). In everyday social encounters Belgians tend to use dialect or a language variety that is quite different from the standard language. This even applies to teachers of Dutch: a survey in Kloots (2003) has found that 76% of the Dutch language teachers in the Netherlands speak standard Dutch at home. In Belgium, this only applies to 24% of the Dutch language teachers. This bigger distance between everyday language use and the standard language in Belgium may have influenced speech rate in a variety of ways. As a result of the less frequent use of the standard language by the Belgians, this language variety may feel less natural to them. They may feel less comfortable and fluent in the standard language than their counterparts in the Netherlands, which may result in a slower speech rate in Belgium, much the same way as non-native speakers of a language generally have a slower speech rate than native speakers. The infrequent use of the standard language and the stronger presence of dialects in everyday social encounters in Belgium allows for a stronger influence of these dialects when Belgians do use the standard language. It is possible that dialects in the northern part of Belgium have an intrinsically lower speech rate than the dialects of the Netherlands and it is this slow speech rate which is carried over into the standard language as a sort of “foreign accent.” At present, however, there is no information available about speech rate in the dialects of Belgium and the Netherlands. Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013


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A third factor that has to be considered is that Belgians may have experienced the interviews as more formal than the informants in the Netherlands. Formality was one of the variables investigated in Malécot et al. (1972) in their study of French. Although they established a trend that formal speech was slower than informal speech (5.7 syll/s vs. 5.9 syll/s) the difference was not significant. It has to be emphasized that the interaction of above-mentioned factors associated with the distance between everyday language use in Belgium and the standard language is a historic one which has existed for several generations. It is therefore not inconceivable that the slower speech rate in Belgian Dutch has set an example in the language acquisition process across generations, which may have been imitated as an essential characteristic of the standard language. As such the slower speech rate may have become codified as an independent norm in the Belgian national variety of Dutch with the result that Belgian Dutch is now spoken inherently more slowly.

3

A possible counter-argument to this interpretation is that the speech rate differences are an artifact of the experimental methods used, particularly since the measures of speech rate in this study are based on a vowel count in orthographic transcriptions. A potential disadvantage of this is a discrepancy with phonetic reality: phonetic processes like schwainsertion in consonant clusters and syllable deletion are not reflected in the orthographic transcription. The former creates extra syllables in that for example, a monosyllable [ mεlk ] ‘milk’ is realized with two syllables as [ mεlək ]. The latter decreases the number of syllables in that for example, [ momεnt ] ‘moment’ is realized as a monosyllable [ mεnt ]. These processes may potentially neutralize the differences in speech rate based on an orthographic transcription in different ways. The first possibility that has to be considered is that there is more schwa insertion in Belgium than in the Netherlands, which would increase the number of syllables and consequently raise speech rate, potentially neutralizing the effect of speech rate in this study. Although it was not possible to comprehensively test schwa insertion in these particular speech samples, independent research by Swerts, Kloots, Gillis, and De Schutter (2001) and Kloots, De Schutter, Gillis, and Swerts (2002) has found that there is more schwa insertion in the Netherlands. The second factor to be considered is syllable deletion. If speakers in the Netherlands drop syllables more often than in Belgium, the number of syllables decreases and this lowers the estimated speech rate, potentially neutralizing the effect of speech rate reported in this study. Syllable deletion was investigated in speech samples of 18 informants who took part in this study (9 Belgium and 9 the Netherlands) and the speech of whom had previously been transcribed phonetically by an independent transcriber for a purpose unrelated to this study. Results show that there is a certain amount of syllable deletion, that is, 1.51% in Belgium and 0.95% in the Netherlands. However, the degree of deletion in both national varieties is very similar. From the two additional analyses presented above it is unlikely that the differences in speech rate based on orthographic transcriptions are neutralized by a calculation of speech rate based on phonetic transcriptions. On the contrary, the higher frequency of schwa insertion in the Netherlands and the slightly higher incidence of syllable deletion in Belgium suggest that estimates of speech rate based on phonetic transcriptions could in fact even reveal a bigger difference between Belgium and the Netherlands. Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013

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In terms of speech perception, the differences in speech rate found in this study are consistent with perception results in Van Heuven (2003). He compared the perception of speech rate in the cities of Amsterdam (Central region) and Nijmegen (Transition): He found that informants’ speech rate in Amsterdam is perceived somewhat faster than that of Nijmegen-Dutch (4.5 vs. 4.2) on a seven-point scale between slow and fast. It should also be mentioned that the average difference in articulation rate between Belgium and the Netherlands is 16%. This value is bigger than the just noticeable difference of speech tempo established by Quené (2004): On the basis of an analysis of tempo variations in spontaneous speech he estimated the JND to be around 10%. This indicates that the differences in speech rate in this study could play a perceptual role and suggests a potential for further perceptual research. Besides a main effect of country on speech rate, the analysis also showed a significant effect of sex and age: men speak faster than women and young people speak faster than older people. The faster articulation rates for men are consistent with research in Whiteside (1996) who also reports significantly faster articulation rates for men (men: 4.10 syll/s vs. women: 3.38 syll/s). Although the difference between men and women is significant in our data, it is not as outspoken as in Whiteside. It is not clear how to account for this consistent difference in speech rate between the sexes. The faster speech rates in the young people of this study are entirely in agreement with the general trend that was established in Malécot et al. (1972), Ramig (1983) and Duchin and Mysak (1987). These measurements are also consistent with perception research into the perception of speech tempo in Van Heuven (2003) who found that speech of young speakers was rated faster than that of older speakers. The fact that the elderly speak more slowly than youngsters is consistent with the neurological effects of ageing in that neurological control over speech production becomes somewhat more difficult and may require more time to be executed. The fact that this study shows a significant effect of country on speech rate as well as of age and sex suggests that an explicit reference to speech rate is necessary in the description of regionally determined differences between accents and the description of sex- and age-related speech characteristics. A substantial number of studies, such as that of Whiteside (1996), have shown that speech rate has an influence on the concrete phonetic realization of speech sounds so that speech rate can cause phonetically different realizations of speech sounds across regions. In order to capture these differences, a full account of speech rate is necessary.

6 Conclusion This paper investigated the relationship between speech rate, linguistic background of speakers and two extralinguistic variables, that is, age and sex. It was shown that all three factors are significantly related to speech rate. As far as regional variation is concerned, a major opposition was found between regions in the Netherlands and regions in Flanders. Average speaking rate in the Netherlands is 4.23, while in Flanders it amounts to 3.98 syll/s. This opposition between the North and the South coincides with a difference in standard language between Belgian Dutch and Dutch in the Language and Speech Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at Universiteit Antwerpen on May 2, 2013


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Netherlands. This difference in speech rate was accounted for in terms of the bigger distance in Belgium between the standard language and language use in everyday situations. The use of the standard language may thus feel less natural than in the Netherlands resulting in a slower speech rate in Belgium. It cannot be excluded that there also is substantial transfer from dialects in Belgium. In view of the historic aspect of this situation, it cannot be excluded that this difference may have been codified in the Belgian variety of Dutch. Besides a regional influence, the age and sex of informants were also found to be significantly related to speech rate: younger speakers talk faster than older speakers, while women speak more slowly than men. These observations suggest that speech rate is a factor that has to be taken into account in the description of accent differences as well as in descriptions of sex- and age-related differences in speech. Received: March 30, 2004; first revision received: September 22, 2004; accepted: September 23, 2004

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