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KUBAN KABARDIAN ARTICULATION RATE: COMPARING DIFFERENT SPEECH PRODUCTION TASKS // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2017. Issue 2 (16). P. 9-17

In this article, I will present data collected during the fieldwork in Khodz (Koshekhablsky District, Republic of Adygea, Russia). The participants (nine native speakers of Kuban dialect of Kabardian) were asked to solve several speech production tasks: – tell a story based on the picture to other participant; – read a prosaic text; – read a verse. Articulation rate was calculated as the number of syllables per second. Several measurements were made: average articulation rate of the different speakers during all tasks and average speech rate de pending on the utterance length. Spontaneous material considered, the average rate equaled 4,33 syllables per second with 95% confident interval equaled ±0,18 and standard deviation equaled 1,19. In (Fonagy, Magdics, 1960; Stepanova, 2011) it is reported a strong negative correlation between speech rate and the utterance length. Our data provide a small correlation (0,1252841 ± 0,07679026) between speech rate and the utterance length. All audio data were annotated using ELAN (v. 4.9.4); measurements were made using Praat (v. 5.3.16); all statistical inferences and visualization were made in R (v. 3.3.2).

Keywords: Circassian languages, Kabardian, speech rate, speech production, text reading