Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages.

ABSTRACT: By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant-speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribu

SUBMITTER: Seifart F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5984521 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature