Automatic measurement of speech rate in spoken Dutch
Nivja H. de Jong, Ton G. Wempe · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2007
In this paper, we describe a method to automatically measure speech rate without the need of a transcription.A script written in the software program PRAAT detects syllables in running speech.Peaks in intensity (dB) that are preceded by dips in intensity are considered as potential syllable nuclei.The script subsequently deletes peaks that are not voiced.Testing the resulting syllable counts of this script on two corpora of spoken Dutch, we obtained high correlations between speech rate calculated from human syllable counts and from automatically determined syllable counts.We conclude that a syllable count measured in this automatic fashion, suffices to reliably assess and compare speech rates between participants and tasks.