Influence of Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Factors on Speech Rate Perception

This study aims to investigate the perception of speech rate in Russian. The goal is to examine the impact of pauses duration, articulation rate, as well as speaker's and listener's gender on speech rate perception. The relevance of this study lies in its potential to improve speech synthesis systems by understanding how speech rate perception varies, particularly between genders. The novelty of the research is in its comprehensive analysis of the impact of gender, articulation speed, and pauses on speech rate perception based on Russian language material. The material of the current study consists of recordings of 2 texts read by 55 native Russian speakers. The series of auditory perceptual experiments contained both natural and modified stimuli. The results of the experiments revealed the impact of speaker's gender on speech rate perception, but no impact of listener's gender. We also found the effect of pauses duration on overall speech rate perception. The results of the study showed that we can describe the speech rate perception through its intrinsic characteristics, such as pausing and articulation rate. We also proposed a model of speech rate perception in Russian language. Although this study did not focused on the effect that speech style and other factors may produce, the data obtained allow identifying important patterns in listener's behavior, that can be applied in natural language processing, as well as in artificial intelligence systems.