Closer Looks at Speech Rate and Pause Variation: Interlocutors and Accommodation

Abstract

Chapter 5 focused on large-scale analyses of the speech rate and pause data derived from the SLAAP archive and Chapter 6 reexamined some of these data from additional perspectives to gain deeper understandings of their patterns. In order to assess overarching patterns in the data in those chapters, I downplayed potential qualitative differences between the interviews that were examined. There are also, of course, other kinds of potential influences on speakers’ timing features that we have not yet considered. I have not, for instance, examined the role that the interlocutors involved in the interviews may play in influencing talkers’ speech rates and pause patterns. Different kinds of interactions can occur in sociolinguistic interviews, which may yield different styles of speech (in terms of, for example, Labov’s 1972 attention to speech, or Tannen’s 1984[2005] conversational styles), and I have not considered issues of comparability between the interview excerpts used for analysis here (see Gregersen, Beck Nielsen, and Thøgersen 2009 and Gregersen and Barner-Rasmussen 2011 for some recent considerations of issues of comparability across sociolinguistic interviews). There are also likely important differences across the interviews that are beyond the capabilities of the present corpus-based analysis.