Quantitative values for perceptual notion of speech speed

Although it is widely used in everyday activities and in several professions such as locution, shorthand and stenography among others, the magnitude speed of speech does not have a precise meaning in everyday use. Such precision is fundamental in the context of the study of the typical behaviour of a large set of language allophones as the basic components for robust speech synthesis. No information was found for Spanish and less for the variant spoken in Uruguay and the center and south of Argentina, usually called Riverplatean Spanish. This article presents a quantitative characterization of the intuitive notions of fast, slow and normal speech speed. The article reports research with strong experimental foundation since its conclusions were obtained from 120 texts uttered by different speakers at different speeds in a context free of any sort of conditioning. More than a half of the texts were collected from public sources and from people who never knew they were being recorded for this purpose.