The effect of intertalker speech rate variation on acoustic vowel space.

The present study aimed to examine the size of the acoustic vowel space in talkers who had previously been identified as having slow and fast habitual speaking rates [Tsao, Y.-C. and Weismer, G. (1997) J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 40, 858-866]. Within talkers, it is fairly well known that faster speaking rates result in a compression of the vowel space relative to that measured for slower rates, so the current study was completed to determine if the same differences in the size of the vowel space occur across talkers who differ significantly in their habitual speaking rates. Results indicated that there was no difference in the average size of the vowel space for slow vs fast talkers, and no relationship across talkers between vowel duration and formant frequencies. One difference between the slow and fast talkers was in intertalker variability of the vowel spaces, which was clearly greater for the slow talkers, for both speaker sexes. Results are discussed relative to theories of speech production and vowel normalization in speech perception.