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From: Sandra Merlo
Date: 17 Oct 2008
Time: 12:18:13 -0500
Remote Name: 201.43.64.84
Dear Tracy, thank you for your question. Speech rate changes not only in accordance with language, but also in the same language (in accordance with sociolinguistic community). I think it’s expected that your Brazilian friend speaks Portuguese with faster rates than when he speaks English, because Portuguese is his native language. Speech rate can affect others fluency components (for example: it tends to increase disfluencies and reformulations because there is less time for language planning). Faster speech rates cause sound durations to be shorter. It happens the opposite in stuttering: stuttered sounds tend to be longer than the fluent ones. So I think it’s reasonable to consider that stuttering may be more severe in languages with faster speech rates, but this should be experimentally tested. Best regards, Sandra