Sociophonetics and speech rate and pause
Speech rate and pause are aspects of prosody with great potential for sociophonetic research. They are features that have been examined in diverse ways over the years, often yielding sociophonetically relevant observations, but only rarely have they been examined in depth from sociophonetic perspectives. This chapter reviews sociophonetic research, as well as work from allied areas such as psycholinguistics and the speech sciences, on these features. It overviews how these features have been defined and studied along with some key findings that have emerged across studies. In addition to reviewing the study of these features in their own right, the chapter also considers how they are important predictors of other variables of interest to sociophoneticians. Finally, to exemplify some sociophonetic analyses, the chapter ends with a short empirical study of speech rate and pause in the Corpus of Regional African American Language, with an example analysis script available for download.
