Lack of effects of gender on the reading rate of long texts

Authors

  • Łukasz Stolarski Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.32924

Keywords:

gender in language, sex in language, reading rate, reading tempo

Abstract

Among various linguistic and extralinguistic factors which may affect speech tempo, the gender of the speaker has received considerable attention. In a number of publications it has been reported that women tend to read at a slower rate than men. However, other studies cast doubt on these findings and the issue needs further investigation. This paper attempts to compare the reading rate of male and female speakers of English on the basis of selected chapters from audiobooks. The recordings analysed are considerably longer than the samples used in previous research. The rate of speech has been measured using phonemes per second, syllables per second and words per second. The results consistently indicate that gender does not affect reading tempo. They are directly applicable in text-to-speech (TTS) software development and may be useful in other disciplines, such as forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics or education.

Author Biography

  • Łukasz Stolarski, Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce

    Łukasz Stolarski, PhD, is currently employed at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland. He is a linguist specializing in phonetics. His projects concern selected phonetic phenomena, such as palatalization or articulation of individual segments, but he has also worked on more interdisciplinary problems, e.g. sizesound symbolism and the interface between phonetics and pragmatics. Moreover, his research interests include other branches of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics and dialectology. He also has considerable experience in corpus linguistics methodology, and in recent years he has developed a keen interest in computational linguistics.

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Published

2019-05-02

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Stolarski, Łukasz. (2019). Lack of effects of gender on the reading rate of long texts. Sociolinguistic Studies, 12(3-4), 461-479. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.32924

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