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Purpose: Earlier work has established developmental benchmarks for intelligibility and articulation rate, but the intersection of these two variables remains unexplored. This study examines the interaction between intelligibility and speaking rate in typically developing children between the ages 2;6 and 9;11 and evaluates whether children show a speed-accuracy tradeoff in their habitual speech production.Method: Speech samples of varying lengths were collected from 538 typically developing children. Intelligibility was measured as the number of words correctly transcribed by untrained adult listeners, and speaking rate was calculated in number of syllables per second. Regression models estimated the effects of age, utterance length, and speaking rate on intelligibility.Results: Intelligibility increased with age and decreased with utterance length. There was a trend for intelligibility to decrease with increased speaking rate, especially in longer utterances. At the individual level, most children had a negative effective of speaking rate on intelligibility. Conclusions: Our findings support the hypothesis that children’s speech is subject to a speed-accuracy tradeoff where increased speaking rate leads to reduced articulatory accuracy and hence reduced intelligibility. Further research is needed on how to apply this tradeoff in a clinical setting.
Mahr et al. (Fri,) studied this question.