Some Factors Affecting the Listener's Perception of Reading Rate in English and French

The method of magnitude estimation was used to scale naturally and mechanically altered rates of two passages in English and French. The scales obtained remained invariant across languages, texts and methods of altering rate. They were not invariant however when Ss estimated naturally and mechanically altered rates one after the other. In this case, Ss changed the weights they attributed to the two component variables of speech rate—namely articulation rate and pause rate—in arriving at a global impression of speech rate. A comparison of the present results with those of prior studies also showed that the scales are not invariant with changes in the range of stimuli presented. An intramodal range effect was confirmed by cross-modality matching in which Ss matched apparent force of handgrip to apparent speech rate.