Looking Forward

Abstract

This book is about speech timing and, more specifically, about variation in the temporal features of speech rate and silent pause in spoken American English, as viewed from a quantitative sociolinguistic, and to a lesser degree psycholinguistic, perspective. Although it is a book explicitly about the sociolinguistics of speech rate and pause, it is also a book more broadly about corpus-based methodologies and about conducting large-scale sociophonetic research. Throughout this book, I attempt to give as complete an overview of the corpus-based methods and statistical maneuvers I employ as I can. As such, I also provide many resources connected to this book on its website – http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/speechrateandpause/-including electronic versions of some data files and tools for, for example, counting syllables in English language orthographic transcripts. It is – of course! – my hope that this project contributes towards our substantive understanding of patterns of speech timing in human language, but I also hope that readers find it useful as a guide to doing large-scale, quantitative sociophonetic research.