[RNLD] Calculating speech rate in ELAN transcripts

[John Mansfield]

I'd like to test the effect of speech rate as part of a variationist study,
and all my data is in time-aligned transcripts (done in ELAN).

I am considering the following method as a way of getting rough speech-rate
calculations for a large number of utterances:

1. For each annotation (representing an utterance), calculate the total
time of the utterance by subtracting start-time from end-time

2. For each annotation, calculate the number of syllables by using a regex
to count vowels (luckily, in this language number of vowels = number of
syllables)

3. Divide utterance time by number of syllables for each utterance.

I'm pretty sure this language should be considered "syllable-timed" rather
than "stress-timed".

Does anybody have any experience with a similar operation?
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