Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances, has also been shown to reduce the role of social factors once it has been accounted for, leaving unclear the relationship between social factors and speech production in conditioning speech rate. Through modelling of speech rate across 13 English speech corpora, it is found that utterance length has the largest effect on speech rate, though this effect itself varies little across corpora and speakers. While age and gender also modulate speech rate, their effects are much smaller in magnitude. These findings suggest utterance length effects may be conditioned by articulatory and perceptual constraints, and that social influences on speech rate should be interpreted in the broader context of how speech rate variation is structured.

翻译：研究表明，语音速率随性别、年龄和方言等社会类别而变化，同时也受言语规划特性的制约。话语长度效应（即较长话语的语音速率更快且变异性更小）已被证实会在被纳入考量后削弱社会因素的影响，这使得社会因素与言语产生在调节语音速率方面的关系尚不明确。通过对13个英语语音语料库中语音速率的建模分析，发现话语长度对语音速率的影响最大，尽管该效应本身在不同语料库和说话者之间差异甚微。虽然年龄和性别也会调节语音速率，但其影响幅度远小于话语长度效应。这些发现表明，话语长度效应可能受发音与感知约束的调节，且语音速率的社会影响因素应置于语音速率变异结构化的更广泛语境中加以阐释。