Measuring Relative Articulation Rate in Finnish Utterances

This paper presents two investigations into articulation rate, or the distribution of segmental duration, in a Finnish language speech corpus. The first study, rank ordering of short utterances according to their component words’ articulation rate, reveals that 75 % or more of Finnish utterances can be expected show some level of final lengthening. Also initial shortening, or accelerated speaking rate in the beginning of utterances, is present in amounts clearly above chance level. The second study, an investigation into how relative duration progresses in utterances, confirms the observations mentioned before. Furthermore, the second study shows the initial and final effects are statistically significant. Importantly, the results are near-identical to those obtained independently from Southern Swedish, even though the languages and corpora in question are entirely different.