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- Title
Rate of Speaking and Reading of Adult Nepali Speakers.
- Authors
Duwal, Bikash; Karki, Bishwajit; George, Krupa Saira; Ravi, Dr. Sunil Kumar.
- Abstract
Introduction: Rate of speech is one of the important aspects of fluency. Any disruptions in rate of speech will lead to disturbances in speech fluency and it has direct effect on the intelligibility of speech. The rate of speech may depend upon several factors such as coordination between speech subsystems, language competence, and the contextual factors and it can be an index for measuring the speed of articulatory movements during speaking. Although normal rate of speech is reported to be in the range of 80-180 words per minute, the mean values vary from language to language. Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language, is the language spoken widely in Nepal by approximately 17 million people. Although it is one of the important languages of Indo-Aryan family, not many studies are available about the characteristics and features of Nepali language. Hence, the present study was carried out with an aim of understanding the rate of speaking/reading of young Nepali speakers. Method: 20 young (10 males and 10 females) native Nepali speakers in the age range of 20-30 years were taken for the present study. Rate of speech was measured using job task in which participants were asked to speak about their job for not less than 100 words or for 2 minutes. For measuring rate of reading, participants were asked to read a story passage in Nepali language with 256 words and 688 syllables at their comfortable speed. All the samples were recorded using Audacity software in Lenovo laptop software and the silent pauses with more than 150 ms were removed from the sample. The total duration and total number of words in both job task and reading task were measured. Rate of speech and reading were measured as words per minute (WPM), syllables per minute (SPM), and syllables per second (SS). Results & Discussion: analysis of speech samples of job task revealed higher rates of speech in males than that of females. Similarly, in rate of reading measures, higher rates were found in males compared to females although statistically not significant. Comparison between the tasks revealed significantly higher rates in job task than reading task. Conclusion: the present study has established normative data for rate of reading and speaking in Nepali language. The present study also found that rate of speech is faster than that of rate of reading in both males and females in Nepali. The results of the present study can be helpful in diagnosing some of the fluency disorders in Nepali language.
- Subjects
NEPALI language; NEPALI people; TEMPO (Phonetics); READING ability testing; NATIVE language
- Publication
Language in India, 2016, Vol 16, Issue 3, p236
- ISSN
1930-2940
- Publication type
Article