Closer Looks at Speech Rate and Pause Variation: Methods and Findings

Abstract

The previous chapter examined a large amount of data from sociolinguistic interviews to determine whether and how speech rate and pause duration variability pattern with social factors in conversational speech and to assess, from a more methodological perspective, what we can gain from a large-scale sociophonetic corpus analysis. Numerous other questions can be asked of speech rate and pause variability, of the methods I have employed, and of these particular data. I turn now to pursue several questions building on the large-scale analyses of the last chapter.