Speaker
Description
This analysis of the link between speech rate and speech reduction identifies the degree to which rate alone drives reduction. Using the German part of the Bonn-Tempo corpus, we analyze vowel, consonant, and pause reduction as a function of speech rate and prosodic accentuation. Phone- and syllable-based rate measures were first computed, followed by Pfitzinger’s perceptual local speech rate (PLSR), allowing a detailed characterization of rate distributions across the five corpus-defined speed levels for individual speakers. Substantial inter-speaker variability is observed, indicating that nominal rate categories only partially reflect actual production. Acoustic analyses of vowel formants show that significant differences in vowel centralization occur primarily between very slow, normal, and very fast speech. After Lobanov normalization, vowel centralization increases approximately linearly with PLSR before reaching a saturation plateau at very high rates. Temporal analyses further reveal that vowel, consonant, and pause compression and elision are not uniform processes, but depend systematically on both accent status and underlying PLSR. These findings demonstrate that speech reduction constitutes a structured, prosodically mediated acoustic dimension that cannot be fully derived from speech rate alone. A companion perceptual study addresses how listeners respond to these reduction patterns.