A Comparative Study of Rate Characteristics in Cleft Palate and Noncleft Palate Speakers

Abstract

In general, researchers in the speech field have concerned themselves with three different aspects of speech rate: impromptu speaking rate, oral reading rate, and perceptual judgments of reading rate. Kelly and Steer (8) introduced a revised concept of speaking rate, that of sentence or phrasal rate. They found that extemporaneous speech is extremely variable, ranging on the average from 125 to 328 words per minute, and that sentence-by-sentence measures of rate are more meaningful than measures of overall rate in analyzing extemporaneous speech. Speech rate has also been investigated in oral reading situations. In a normative study of oral reading rate, Darley (1) constructed three 300-word passages, each with a different syllabic content, and established normative data on oral reading rate for all three passages. Another aspect of speech rate is that of perceptual judgments of oral reading rate. Johnson (7) had his subjects read a narrative passage at what they considered to be slow, medium, and rapid rates. His results indicated that the means were 151, 170, and 216 words per minute for the three reading rates, respectively. Franke (4) conducted an experiment to determine if a speaker's word per minute rate was related to the perception of rapidity 0r slowness by observers. She found a very high corre— lation (+93) between the measures of rate in words per minute and the judgments of oral reading rate. In a study of rate alterations in oral reading, Gilbert (5) noted that significant alterations occurred in the reading rates of his subjects when they were asked to make the prescribed changes in their reading rates; however, in no case did the observed dif— ferences equal the requested differences. The majority of studies on speech rate have been concerned with the normal pOpulation. Rate has never been investigated in any systematic manner for the cleft palate population. It is not currently known whether the speech rate of cleft palate speakers differs from that of non— cleft palate speakers in oral reading and impromptu speaking tasks; nor