This paper investigates speech rate in two standard national varieties of Dutch on the basis of 160 15 mins conversations with native speakers who belong to four different regions in the Netherlands and four in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders). Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate and speaking rate, both expressed as the number of syllables per second (syll/s). The results show a significant effect of speakers' country of origin: subjects in the Netherlands speak 16% faster than subjects in Belgium (articulation: 5.05 vs. 4.23 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.00 syll/s). In addition, the independent variable sex was also found to be significant: on average, men speak 6% faster than women (articulation: 4.79 vs. 4.50 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.01 syll/s). The independent variable age was significant too: younger subjects speak 5% faster than older ones (articulation: 4.78 vs. 4.52 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.01 syll/s). The findings of this study confirm the traditional view that speech rate is determined by extralinguistic variables, but also suggest that there may be intrinsic tempo differences between language varieties.

No abstract

Acoustic measurements have shown that the speech of hearing-impaired (HI) children differs from that of normally hearing (NH) children, even after several years of device use. This study focuses on the perception of HI speech in comparison to NH children's speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether adult listeners can identify the speech of NH and HI children. Moreover, it is studied whether listeners' experience and the children's length of device use play a role in that assessment. For this study, short utterances of 7 children with a cochlear implant (CI), 7 children with an acoustic hearing aid (HA) and 7 children with NH were presented to 90 listeners who were required to specify the hearing status of each speech sample. The judges had different degrees of familiarity with hearing disorders: there were 30 audiologists, 30 primary schoolteachers and 30 inexperienced listeners. The results show that the speech of children with NH and HI can reliably be identified. However, listeners do not manage to distinguish between children with CI and HA. Children with CI are increasingly identified as NH with increasing length of device use. For children with HA, there is no similar change with longer device use. Also, experienced listeners seem to display a more lenient attitude towards atypical speech, whereas inexperienced listeners are stricter and generally consider more utterances to be produced by children with HI.

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children’s language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples of children with CI and children with NH were orthographically transcribed by naïve transcribers. The entropy of the transcriptions was computed to analyze their degree of uniformity. The same samples were also rated on a continuous rating scale by another group of adult listeners. The transcriptions of the NH children’s speech were more uniform, i.e., had significantly lower entropy, than those of the CI children, suggesting that the latter group displayed lower intelligibility. This was confirmed by the ratings on the continuous scale. Despite the relatively restricted age ranges, older children reached better intelligibility scores in both groups.

This paper focuses on schwa epenthesis in present-day spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch. Schwa epenthesis is studied in consonant clusters consisting of /r/ followed by a non-dental consonant. We compare the pronunciation of men and women, older and younger speakers, Flemings and Dutchmen originating from several regions in the Dutch language area. Since words with tautosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werk ‘work’) showed somewhat more schwa epenthesis than words with heterosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werken ‘to work’), both word types were analyzed separately. In contrast to the results of Kloots et al. (2002/2004) the Flemish speakers produced more schwas than the Dutch ones. The older generation used more schwas than the younger generation. This tendency was particularly strong within the group of female speakers. Moreover, our study revealed that schwa epenthesis is much more likely when /r/ is pronounced as a trill or fricative, although a non-vocalic pronunciation of /r/ does not lead to schwa insertion automatically.