Perception of speech rate of Dutch and Italian utterances

The speech signal contains many linguistic and prosodic cues which determine the perception of speech rate. We investigated which cues could optimally explain rate judgements of short Dutch and Italian utterances. For this, the correlation between an objective measure of speech rate (linguistic syllables per second, phonetic syllables per second, or phonetic segments per second) and perceived speech rate has been evaluated for rate judgements of normal, monotone, and unintelligible utterances. The effect of language background on speech rate perception was also studied, by using Dutch and Italian listeners.