Extracting speech-rate values from a real-speech database

An examination of the articulatory and acoustic correlates of duration change using rules based on Klatt '79 confirms the influence of such known effects as stress, phonetic context, intrinsic vowel duration, part of speech, and position in utterance and provides a key to quantifying and isolating the effects of speech-rate through measurement of the smoothed error extracted from the difference between predicted and observed durations.<>