24.2986, Review: Cognitive Science; Phonetics; Phonology; Sociolinguistics: Kendall (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2986. Tue Jul 23 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2986, Review: Cognitive Science; Phonetics; Phonology; Sociolinguistics: Kendall (2013)

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Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 09:54:13
From: Susan Joffe [susanjoffe at gmail.com]
Subject: Speech Rate, Pause and Sociolinguistic Variation

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-1422.html

AUTHOR: Tyler  Kendall
TITLE: Speech Rate, Pause and Sociolinguistic Variation
SUBTITLE: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Susan Joffe, Bar-Ilan University

SUMMARY

“Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus
Sociophonetics” presents a series of corpus-based studies of speech rate and
pause. The studies look at individual speaker differences, but are
particularly focused on the influence of social variables such as region and
gender. In addition, the author devotes considerable attention to phonetic and
sociophonetic research methodologies and to the value of corpus-based
research. A website accompanies the book and includes data sets, as well as
many of the statistical algorithms and tools needed to do the types of
research described in the book.

The book is organized into three sections. The first section reviews the study
of speech rate and pause from a psycholinguistic and a sociolinguistic
perspective. The author discusses the theoretical paradigms behind the
studies, the methodologies used, and their findings. A detailed introduction
to the author’s own corpus-based research and methods is included as well. In
the second section, the author presents a number of sociophonetic studies of
speech and pause rate and discusses the merits and shortcomings of the
methodologies used in each. The final section includes a broad discussion of
the study of speech rate and pause as a means of understanding sociolinguistic
variation.

In Chapter 1, the author provides brief overviews of the study of speech rate
and pause. He discusses the ways they have been studied by sociolinguists and
psycholinguists over the last 70 years. Among the discussion is the research
by sociolinguists Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), which demonstrated
structured homogeneity. Kendall also cites the work of psycholinguists Sumner
and Samuel (2009) on dialect, who also concluded that individuals vary their
pronunciation in different contexts. They therefore argued for a more complex
understanding of dialect. Furthermore, the benefits of studying speech rate
and pause as a means of understanding sociolinguistic variation are put
forward as well. Kendall notes that speech rate and pauses are salient
features of speech in all languages. In addition to the meaning conveyed by
words, grammaticality, accent, speech rate and pause carry socially determined
meaning in all languages.

Chapter 2 gives a comprehensive review of the literature regarding speech rate
and pause. Kendall notes that social judgments are often made about a speaker
based on his or her rate of speech. In the United States, for example,
Southerners are perceived as slower speakers than people from other regions of
the country. This slower rate of speech is often judged negatively by
non-Southerners. The approaches used historically to study speech rate and
pause are presented as well. Tannen (1984) saw speech rate differences as part
of conversational style, while Schnoebelen (2009) and Silverstein (2003)
looked at speech rate in terms of indexicality. All of this background
situates the author’s own research and provides the necessary background for
understanding how his work moves the field forward, both methodologically and
in terms of actual findings.

In Chapter 3, Kendall introduces the reader to the corpora he has used in his
sociophonetic research. He discusses the origins of the source data and the
methods he has used to analyze data in different studies. One source of
Kendall’s data is the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP),
which is a joint project between the North Carolina Language and Life Project
and the North Carolina State University Libraries. SLAAP is an archive for
recorded speech data from numerous studies. In addition to archiving its data,
SLAAP tries to standardize the management of the data and its representation.
Data from the SLAAP archive can be viewed in vertical, column-based, and
paragraph formats. All transcripts are organized by phonetic utterances, and
transcripts are stored database tables. The other source of data Kendall
discusses is Online Speech/Corpora Archive and Analysis Resource (OSCAAR),
which is an archive and data management system at Northwestern University. The
main difference between the two archives is that the recordings in SLAAP are
mostly sociolinguistic recordings, while those in OSCAAR are primarily
lab-based.

Chapter 4 gives the reader an example of Kendall’s corpus-based sociophonetic
research. Kendall presents a study looking at the speech and pause rates of
people from three regions of the United States (i.e. North, South, and West)
using data from the OSCAAR archive. Each participant read the same text aloud
to provide a sample. The measurements used and the methods of analyzing the
data are presented and explained, along with graphs illustrating the results.
Measurements of articulation rates by speaker and by utterance, and speaking
rates by talker yielded very similar results: Westerners spoke more quickly
than both Southerners and Northerners. The advantages and disadvantages of
reading samples are discussed as well. Kendall acknowledges that
conversational speech cannot be controlled in the same way that reading
samples can, but nevertheless argues that it is preferable to control speech
samples.

In Chapter 5, Kendall presents research using conversation-based corpora from
SLAAP, as opposed to reading passages. The methods, analysis, and results of
this research form the main portion of the book. The studies measure speech
and pause rates at the utterance level, the pause level, and the speaker
level. The approaches are compared to determine which method better accounts
for the data. Kendall demonstrates that speech and pause rates are influenced
by region, ethnicity, and gender. Southerners, in the data examined here, do
indeed have longer pause rates, yielding slower speech than speakers from
other regions of the United States. Kendall also discusses the cost and
benefit of using very large data samples in terms of yielding better models
and more accurate accounts of research findings.

In Chapter 6, Kendall continues to present results of the research described
in Chapter 5. The questions of how to measure pauses, and the variability of
the duration of pauses are presented as well. A variety of both speech rate
and pause measurements were used and are documented with clear graphs and
tables. Kendall shows how changes in sample size and measurement of different
factors cause significant and insignificant differences in the models (e.g.
mixed-effect vs. fixed-effect). This simultaneous presentation of findings and
critiques of methodologies is consistent throughout the book.

Chapter 7 turns away from the focus on speech and pause rates as measurements
of sociolinguistic variation. Instead, Kendall looks at the influence that
interlocutors have on variation in the speech rates and pauses of individuals.
The data presented specifically address the question of how accommodation
influences variation in individual speakers’ rates of speech and their use of
pauses. His research shows that speakers’ speech and pause rate vary based on
their interlocutors, the gender of their interlocutors, and the number of
participants in an interaction. One of the most interesting findings he
reports in this chapter is that the “interviewers” in many of his samples
appear to accommodate their interlocutors more than the interviewees. Here, as
in previous chapters, he presents and discusses both his results and
statistical methods.

In Chapter 8, the author presents a method of speech and pause rate analysis
not previously mentioned in the book. This is the Henderson graph, originally
used in psycholinguistic research in the 1960s. In Kendall’s words, the
Henderson graph “is a representation of a speech event in which talk time is
plotted on the x-axis while pause time extends along the y-axis” (192). The
steepness of the slope of each turn reflects the speaker’s pauses, as well as
other fluency measures. Kendall demonstrates that the use of Henderson graphs,
as he uses them in this chapter, allows researchers to better measure and
understand variability in speech timing and pause realizations.

Chapter 9 briefly summarizes the findings of the book and encourages further
research using corpora, as well as the statistical methods presented above.

EVALUATION

“Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus
Sociophonetics” will be useful to many groups of researchers. For those who
want to understand the social factors influencing speech rate and pauses,
several studies are presented which show how their variability can indeed be
explained by social factors, such as gender and region of residency. For
readers who want a better understanding of the statistics involved in this
research, Kendall gives very clear explanations of which statistics he uses
and why. Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries will be readers who seek to
understand the value of large corpora in sociolinguistic research on
variation. Kendall makes a strong argument in favor of corpus based research,
in general, and demonstrates clearly how he uses large corpora in the study of
sociophonetics, in particular. Throughout the book, Kendall gives the reader a
history of statistical methods used in sociolinguistic variation research and
presents new statistical approaches as well. The ways in which fixed and mixed
effect regression modeling enable us to explain and understand the data are
clearly shown. He shows how advances in statistical methodologies and computer
access have made these methods accessible to all researchers. Readers working
in other areas of sociolinguistic research, as well as psycholinguistic
research, can benefit from the clear and straightforward explanations given
here.

For the reader who wishes to learn more about how to study phonetics and
sociophonetics, the author describes a variety of methodologies. Together with
the accompanying website, the reader is presented with very detailed technical
explanations of how speech rate and pauses are measured and analyzed. Whenever
Kendall gives these technical explanations, he also provides a discussion of
how and why these methods are useful and how they complement or contradict
each other. He offers guidelines for readers in order to help them decide how
to select methods that will best suit their purposes.

In providing a historical review of research on sociophonetics, the reader is
introduced to studies from both psycholinguists and sociolinguists. Kendall
clarifies how the paradigms of both groups of researchers influence their
methodologies. He also provides numerous examples of how they complement and
inform each other. He gives examples of the two groups’ nomenclature
describing the same phenomena, and also shows cases where, in fact, they are
asking different questions.

Kendall makes a very strong argument throughout the book for using corpora for
sociophonetic research. He demonstrates how data samples taken from different
groups of researchers, for different purposes, at different times, can
nevertheless be combined to give large samples that can be analyzed together.
The benefits of large data samples are clear: they allow complex statistical
analyses which cannot be done on smaller samples accurately or reliably. The
models generated by the use of these samples are robust. Kendall shows that
different methods of analysis of the corpora validate each other’s results.
While he makes the argument for corpora use in the study of sociophonetics,
researchers in other areas of sociolinguistics can easily see the benefits of
them as well.

“Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus
Sociophonetics” will be a valuable book for students and researchers of
psychology, sociology, and linguistics. Readers will come away from this book
understanding the hows and the whys of social science statistics, as well as
the values and limitations of corpus-based research. Finally, the link to a
website with datasets and explanations of statistical methods is very helpful,
as it allows the reader up-close and in-depth access to the data and
methodologies. As research scientists, we want our methods and results to be
transparent and replicable, and Kendall makes this possible by allowing the
reader so much access to his own data. This linkage, which was not possible
just a few years ago, should be a model for other writers presenting their
research.

REFERENCES

Schnoebelen, Tyler. 2009. The social meaning of tempo. Unpublished manuscript.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University.

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of
sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23(3-4). 193-229.

Sumner, Meghan & Arthur Samuel 2009. The effect of experience on the
perception and representation of dialect variants. Journal of Memory and
Language 60. 487-501.

Tannen, Deborah. 1984[2005]. Conversational Style: Analyzing talk among
friends, rev. edn. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, & Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations
for a theory of language change. In Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds.).
Directions for Historical Linguistics, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
95-195.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Joffe is a PhD student in Linguistics at Bar Ilan University. She has an
AB in Linguistics from the Univeristy of Michigan and a MS in TESOL from the
Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her
dissertation research focuses on the interaction of identity, motivation, and
second language proficiency among English speaking immigrants to Israel. Her
areas of interest include bilingualism, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics,
language impairment, and research methodologies.








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