Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics - Hardcover

Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation examines the confluence of psycholinguistic factors and social factors in linguistic variation through corpus-based analyses of speech rate and silent pause in US English. In particular, based on a large amount of data extracted from a wide range of sociolinguistic interview recordings, it demonstrates the great extent to which articulation rates are correlated with social factors of speakers (such as regional origin and sex) while pause durations are less so. Through the development of new quantitative techniques, it considers the cognitive importance of variability in pauses and highlights new ways that speech features like these can be used to help understand the production of sociolinguistic variables. With detailed discussions of its data and methods, and with a helpful accompanying website, it makes a valuable guide for conducting one's own corpus (socio)phonetic research.

TYLER KENDALL is Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Oregon, USA. He works on sociophonetic, corpus and computational methods in the study of language variation and change. He is the developer of numerous sociolinguistic software projects, including SLAAP, and has published several articles and book chapters about data in spoken language research.