Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Posted by Arne Adolfsen in Facebook, this Our New Age comic strip of 12/5/65:

Time-compressed speech is indeed in use. From Wikipedia:

Time-compressed speech is a technique used, often in advertising, to make recorded speech contain more words in a given time, yet still be understandable.

Methods:

Removal of silences. There are normally silences between words and sentences, and even small silences within certain words. These can be reduced considerably and still leave an understandable result.

Increasing speed. The speed can be increased on the entire audio track, but this has the undesirable effect of increasing the frequency, so the voice sounds high-pitched (like someone who has inhaled helium). This can be compensated for, however, by bringing the pitch back down to the proper frequency.

Time-compressed speech has never really caught on as a classroom tool, however.

This entry was posted on April 4, 2013 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Language technology, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.