2012 Articulation Rate and Syllable Reduction in Spanish and Portuguese

Jensen (1989) found an asymmetry in mutual intelligibility of South-American Spanish and Portuguese. According to Vaughan and Letowski (1997), Gordon-Salant et al. (2007) and Schüppert et al. (In druk) a higher articulation rate shows negative effects on intelligibility.

This study compares canonical articulation rates (number of canonical syllables per second) and phonetic articulation rates (phonetic syllables per second) of European Spanish and Portuguese based on radio podcasts. The results show that Portuguese and Spanish speakers exhibit no difference in canonical articulation rate but the phonetic articulation rates differ among the two languages. By comparing those two measures we found that Portuguese speakers reduce syllables significantly more than Spanish speakers due to vowel elision in post-stressed and final position, which results in longer, but fewer syllables per second.

The results lead to a future experiment where intelligibility scores of European Spanish and Portuguese will be correlated with articulation rate.

References

Gordon-Salant, S., P. J. Fitzgibbons, and S. Friedman. (2007). Recognition of Time Compressed and Natural Speech With Selective Temporal Enhancements by Young and Elderly Listeners. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50. 1181-1193.
Jensen, J. (1989). On the Mutual Intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese, Hispania, 72.
Schüppert, A., Hilton, N. H., Gooskens, C., and Heuven, V. J. van. (In druk-a). Syllable deletion in contemporary Danish. Copenhagen studies in Language.
Schüppert, A., Gooskens, C. Hilton, N. H., and Heuven, V. J. van. (In druk-b). Stavelsebortfall i modern danska. Danske Talesprog 12. 151-181.
Vaughan, N. E. and T. Letowski. (1997). E ects of age, speech rate, and type of test on temporal auditory processing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 40:5. 1192-1200.