Peer-reviewed research
Towards an integrated understanding of speaking rate in conversation
Jiahong Yuan et al., Interspeech 2006, 2006
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- Measures speaking rate in large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese. It reports overall and net words per minute and shows how the rate depends on turn length and on whether silences are counted.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed conference paper using large recorded corpora from the Linguistic Data Consortium. The speech is spontaneous conversation, not dictation, and the rate depends on how pauses are counted, which the paper discusses.
Facts taken from this source
- In large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese, the overall average rate was 196 words per minute, counting all elapsed time.
“we find an overall average rate of 196 words per minute (WPM)” (Paper text, overall rate)
- Measured over elapsed time, the speaking rate of individual conversations ranges from 111 to 291 words per minute.
“the rate measured in this way ranges from 111 WPM to 291 WPM” (Section 2, speaking rate measures)
- When silences and non-speech noises are removed from conversational telephone speech, the average net speaking rate is 236 words per minute.
“we find an average “net” speaking rate of 236 WPM, with a minimum of 158 WPM and a maximum of 312 WPM” (Section 2, speaking rate measures)
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