Peer-reviewed research
How suitable are TED talks for academic listening?
Peter Wingrove, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2017 · DOI 10.1016/j.jeap.2017.10.010
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A corpus comparison of one-minute samples of TED talks and university lectures that measured speech rate in syllables per second and words per minute, along with vocabulary and lexical density. It tests whether TED talks can stand in for lectures in academic listening courses.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed. The abstract reports the significance tests for the speed difference but not the mean speeds, which we could not read in full text. The sample is small (about 40 to 50 samples per genre) and drawn from one kind of lecture.
Facts taken from this source
- In a 2017 comparison of one-minute samples, speech was significantly faster in TED talks than in university lectures, in syllables per second and in words per minute.
“speech rate, which was found to be significantly faster in TED talks, in terms of syllables per second” (Abstract)