The Consistency of Temporal Speech Characteristics in a Repetitive Oral Reading Task

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the consistency of subjects' temporal speech characteristics in a repetitive oral reading task. Thirteen subjects read " The Rainbow Passage " fifteen consecutive times in each of three experimental sessions. Analysis of the readings indicates that the subjects' temporal speech characteristics, including overall rate, total time, speech time, total pause time, intra-sentence pause time, inter-sentence pause time, number of intra-sentence pauses, number of inter-sentence pauses, speech-time ratio, and pause-time ratio appear to be highly consistent from reading to reading as well as from session to session. Implications of these findings for future research on oral reading rate are discussed.

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