• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.159-168
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to assess the speech rate, fluency and the type of dysfluencies of normal adults in order to provide a basic data of normal speaking. The number of subjects of this study were 30(14 females and 16 males), and their ages ranged 17 to 36. The rate was measured as syllables per minute (SPM). The speech rates in reading ranged 273-426 with a mean of 348 SPM and in speaking ranges 118-409 (mean=265). The average of their fluencies was 99.1% in reading and 96.9% in speaking. The rater reliability of speech rate in the data assessed by video was very high (r=0.98) and the rater reliability of speech fluency was moderately high (r=0.67). The disfluency types were also analysed from 150 disfluency episodes. Syllable repetition and word interjection were the most common disfluent types.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.163-168
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• 2009

This study investigated the determination of speech rates, words per minute (WPM) and syllables per minute (SPM), of $5{\sim}7$ year-old normal children to understand if there are any differences in the rates according to the children's age and sex. All participants were required to conduct story retelling tasks (SRT) and picture description tasks (PDT). In SRT, there was a significant difference between the groups of 5 year-old and 7 year-old children on WPM. However, there was no significant difference between the groups of ages regarding SPM. In addition, there was no significant difference between the groups according to sex on WPM and SPM. In PDT, there was no significant difference between the groups according to their ages and sex on WPM and SPM. The current research found that the speech rates of the preschool children might be somewhat different in their utterance abilities according to their age, but there was no obvious difference according to their sex. The findings can advance development of a clinical tool to screen children with fluency disorders and to determine the steps in establishing speech rates of children in the language development period.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.273-284
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• 2000

The purpose of this study was to investigate speech rate and fluency in stuttering adults. It was suggested that a measurement guideline of speech rate and fluency for collecting clinically meaningful data be used. Subjects included 10 adults who stutter (mean age=25;8). Syllables were used as the unit of measurement for analyzing the duration of speech. The mean rate was 241 SPM (syllables per minute) for reading, and 196 SPM for spontaneous speaking. Fluency was also measured in both cases. The correlation between rate of speech and fluency was high (r=0.92). A strong positive correlation was found between different investigators in measuring speech rates and fluencies.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.93-103
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to establish preliminary data on the speech rates in groups of normal speaking adults and children. The results of the present study are intended to serve as clinical measurement guidelines for diagnosis, assessment, treatment planning, and therapy progresses of stuttering. Thirty-one adults (16 females, 15 males), aged 18-30 years and thirty normally developing children (15 females, 15 males), aged 8-10, participated in the study. The subjects' reading of the Stroll (Jeong, 1994) passage and l-minute portion of talking about the daily routine were sampled. The adult speakers had rates of $308.29\pm22.57$ syllables per minute (SPM) or $108.06\pm6.17$ words per minute (WPM) during reading, and $252.87\pm40.86$ SPM and $92.26\pm17.12$ WPM during talking. The children had rates of $176.67\pm33.65$ SPM or $64.07\pm12.62$ WPM during reading, and $149.30\pm33.14$ SPM and $56.60\pm11.36$ WPM during talking. The results of t-tests for reading and talking tasks in adults showed that SPM in reading (t=2.211, p< .05) and WPM in talking (t=-2.284, p< .05) differed significantly by the gender. To answer the questions whether the rate is different across children' s gender and age, a two-way ANOVA was performed. Both SPM and WPM in reading tasks were significantly different between groups of children aged 8 and 10 (p< 01), In speaking tasks, both SPM and WPM were significantly different between groups of children aged 8 and 10, and between 9 and 10.