| abstract | Older listeners often complain that younger talkers are speaking at a rate that is
uncomfortably fast for them, so that the older listeners fail to comprehend the younger
talkers’ speech (e.g. Hofland, 2004; Ephimenco, 2010). In this paper I will explore the
phonetic tenability of this impressionistic claim that “we are speaking faster than
before”.
One reason for the older listeners’ impression could be a downward trend in the
listeners’ own speaking tempo, due to age-related reductions of their articulatory and
cognitive capacities (Salthouse, 1991; Burke & Shafto, 2004; Spieler & Griffin, 2006).
The stimulus speech tempo with which listeners are most comfortable is presumably the
same as their own tempo when speaking. As younger talkers generally speak faster than
older talkers (trend 1), the youngers’ speech is regarded as “fast” by older listeners. This
impression is aggravated by the olders’ reduced auditory and cognitive capacities in
speech perception (e.g. Janse, 2009). This tentative explanation is corroborated by several studies which have
demonstrated that speech tempo is indeed lower for older talkers (Quené, 2008;
Jacewicz, Fox & Wei, 2010; Horton, Spieler & Shriberg, 2010). This age-related decline
may suggest a negative answer to the title question. All these studies, however,
compared talkers of various ages at one point in time, i.e. by means of apparent-time,
between-talker comparisons. Hence, the observed age effects might also have been
related to other differences between younger and older talkers, such as the talkers’
education levels (Jacewicz, Fox & Wei, 2010), average utterance length (Quené, 2008)
and average lexical diversity (Horton, Spieler & Shriberg, 2010), and the findings of
these between-talker studies do not answer the title question satisfactorily |
