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Phonological Complexity, Segment Rate and Speech Tempo Perception

Studies of speech tempo commonly use syllable or segment rate 
as a proxy measure for perceived tempo. In languages whose 
phonologies allow substantial syllable complexity these 
measures can produce figures on quite different scales; 
however, little is known about the correlation between syllable 
and segment rate measurements on the one hand and naive 
listeners’ tempo judgements on the other. 
We follow up on the findings of one relevant study on 
German [1], which suggest that listeners attend to both syllable 
and segment rates in making tempo estimates, through a 
weighted average of the rates in which syllable rate carries more 
weight. We report on an experiment in which we manipulate 
phonological complexity in English utterance pairs that are 
constant in syllable rate. Listeners decide for each pair which 
utterance sounds faster. Our results suggest that differences in 
segment rate that do not correspond to differences in syllable 
rate have little impact on perceived speech tempo in English.