I haven't read the Du, Lin and Wang study, but I can confirm your suspicion that many (perhaps most) Chinese words are disyllabic, so if the study is equating Chinese syllables or characters to Chinese words when reporting speech rate then it is misleading. A more accurate equation is that each syllable is one *morpheme* (though there are exceptions even to that rule).
Hi
I would call upon a fluent speaker of mandarin to comment on this, but I’m not sure that there is a strong parallel between rates of “words” [sic] between mandarin and english. [I do not speak or understand mandarin but have had a number of lessons.]
Given the importance of intonation of chinese characters, 400 ‘words’ [sic] per minute — [I would guess that a more correct translation would be ‘characters’], works out to about 15/sec — ~60ms. This is, as I understand it, towards the upper limit of pitch streaming in music, for instruments such as the piano or sitar.
To extract 15 intonation curves per second may be strongly dependent upon having a good contextual knowledge, and a mid-level [predictive] grouping of characters, again, by context, so that meaning can be derived.
Kevin
> On 2016, Jun 22, at 3:52 PM, Gerry A Stefanatos <stefang@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am also finding it very helpful to get this input from such diverse and widely read group of contributors. Thank-you.
>
> Here are a couple of other citations to add to the pile.
>
> Sandra Duchin and Edward Mysak (1987) DISFLUENCY AND RATE CHARACTERISTICS OF YOUNG ADULT, MIDDLE-AGED, AND OLDER MALES. Journal of Communication Disorders, 20, pgs 245-257. They calculated both syllables per second and words per minute in different age groups ranging from young adult to the elderly. Measurements were taken during conversation, picture description and oral reading. Not surprisingly, the rates varied across speaking measures. Oral reading was fastest, followed by conversation and finally picture description. All declined with age. (Note, included inter sentence pauses in the calculations.) The maximum speaking rate as indexed by syllables/second was evident in young adults during oral reading ( mean = 4.69, SD =.77). Average word rate/min was highest in young adults during oral reading (219.9, SD=37.1) decreasing to 182.7 (SD=17.2) during conversation.
>
> Also of potential interest, a fairly recent study using Chinese speakers and listeners suggested that speech remains readily intelligible until about 400 words per minute and then declines rapidly from 400 to 1200 words per minute (Du, Lin & Wang (2014), Effect of speech rate for sentences on speech intelligibility, IEEE, pgs 233-236)
>
> Gerry
> --
> Gerry A. Stefanatos, D.Phil.
> Associate Professor
> Director, Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab
> Dept of Communication Science & Disorders
> Temple University
> 1301 N. 13th St.
> Philadelphia, PA, 19122.
> http://www.tuneurolab.com/
>
>
>
>
> On 6/22/16, 5:00 AM, "AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception on behalf of Bruno L. Giordano" <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of brungio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Thank you all for the useful references and discussion!
>
> Another I found for speech rate (wpm) but also syllabic rate is this one:
>
> @article{tauroza1990speech,
> title={Speech rates in british english},
> author={Tauroza, Steve and Allison, Desmond},
> journal={Applied linguistics},
> volume={11},
> number={1},
> pages={90--105},
> year={1990},
> publisher={Am Assoc Appl Ling}
> }
>
> Best,
>
> Bruno
>
> On 21/06/2016 02:56, Kevin Austin wrote:
>> Thank you.
>>
>> In Dunn and White(1940) at the bottom of page 282, the article reads:
>>
>>>>> R.M.S. IN ONE-FOURTH-SECOND INTERVALS
>>>>>
>>>>> The one-eighth-second interval, used in the preceding work, was chosen as being of the same order of magnitude as the length of a syllable.
>>
>> I did not see the reference to ‘how’ this was determined. My reading of ‘order of magnitude’ is that this is a factor of ten. If my understanding is approximately correct, this would mean that rather than 125 ms being the length of a syllable, a syllable could be from about 65ms to 650ms in duration.
>>
>> My understanding of the article is that it is about peak and R.M.S. pressures in 125 ms intervals in 12 frequency bands up to 12kHz.
>>
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 2016, Jun 20, at 7:33 AM, Christine Rankovic <rankovic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dunn and White (1940) is a classic report on speech measurements. They assumed 1/8-second as the length of a syllable for their classic measurements.
>>>
>>> The reference is: Dunn, H.K. and White, S.D. (1940). Statistical Measurements on Conversational Speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 11:278-288.
>>>
>>> Christine Rankovic, PhD
>>> Speech and Hearing Scientist
>>>
>>>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Bruno L. Giordano, PhD
> Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology
> 58 Hillhead Street, University of Glasgow
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>
>