[The perception of the second language production]

Non-native speakers of a second language often report that the speech rate in that language is faster than the rate in their own language. So as to compare speech rate perception by native (French) and non-native (Swiss German) speakers, and to determine if rate estimation by non-native speakers is correlated with their level of comprehension, we asked two groups of 96 participants, native and non-native speakers of French, to listen to short stories read at slow, medium and fast rates. They were asked to answer a few comprehension questions and to give an estimate of the speech rate. The results obtained show that there is indeed a difference between the two groups: the faster the physical speech rate, the greater the impression of speed in the non-native speakers as compared with the native speakers. In addition, when speech rate is slow and normal, there is a significant negative correlation between oral comprehension and perceived rate: the lower the comprehension, the higher the estimated rate.