AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.
The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.
AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2025 No 3 (2025), 11–31
ArticleExploring the phrase-internal changes in articulation rate: the LARometer tool and its applications
Michaela Svatošová
, Jan Volín
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2025.18
published online: 26. 01. 2026
abstract
The article introduces a method of normalising the inherent durational properties of phones (the LARometer), providing a relative measure of local articulation rate (LAR). It allows for the quantification of the communicatively relevant variations in articulation rate and their visualisation in temporal contours. The normalisation is based on an extensive manually annotated corpus containing over four hours of continuous speech. The usage of the LARometer is illustrated with two studies. Study 1 identifies locally decelerated content words in Czech radio news reading. These decelerated words often had prominent functions in the information structure (rheme, contrastive topic). The results also indicated that deceleration affects various parts of words. Study 2 focuses on phone reductions in television political debates. The reductions were predominantly observed in content words, but function words were affected to greater extent. Also, considerable differences in the number of reductions were found between individual speakers.
keywords: local articulation rate; temporal variability; phone duration; normalisation; information structure
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Exploring the phrase-internal changes in articulation rate: the LARometer tool and its applications is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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ISSN: 0567-8269
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