Evidence for the adaptive nature of speech on the phrase level and below.

This paper reports some production and perception experiments challenging the idea that the rate of articulation of interpause intervals of speech is solely conditioned by internal phonological factors. The results reported demonstrate that, at least for one professional newsreader, rate of articulation in interpause intervals is conditioned by context and that deviations from the intended rate are easily noticeable and affect perceived naturalness negatively. It is also demonstrated that a context-conditioned rate of articulation does not affect interpause intervals uniformly but is unevenly distributed. These results are interpreted in terms of speaker adaptation to the listener's running access to signal-independent information.