So everyone here living in north or north east do they sound like they are talking slow?
Note not even places in California, Nevada ,south of Florida talk that fast like the first video.
The first video is someone reading the news. Speaking quickly is an asset in her profession. It’s not indicative of a normal rate of speech. I’ve met slow talkers and fast talkers everywhere in this country. There may be some association of slow speech with the south and rural areas, but I don’t know if there’s any real basis behind it.
That is incorrect. The gaps and pauses that characterize extemporaneous speech waste air time, and that is avoided, but TV presentation (including the news) is intended to sound friendly and natural to the intended audience. In the first video, the anchor sounds relaxed and conversational, whereas the correspondent sounds businesslike and prepared. Neither is talking “fast,” and neither are the interviewees.
I didn’t watch the entire length of the rest of the videos, but they’re a mixed bag; the non-professional “accent tag” players speed up and slow down as most people do, mixing stretches of slow, careful, “I’m-talking-to-an-audience” speech with bursts of “I-know-exactly-what-I’m-going-to say-next” fluency. The “American Voices” video I skipped through in seconds, as almost everyone (including the narrator) was sheer torture to listen to as th-e-ey dr-a-a-awled the-eir wa-ay through the simplest utterance as if everybody had all goddamn day.
Because southerners DO speak more slowly, on the whole. I’ve been taking phone calls from people all over the country for 40 hours a week for the past 4+ years, my job is my cite. FYI, people who speak slowly (including, but not limited to, most southerners) also process speech at a slower rate, especially compared to people in the northeast. I’m a midwesterner, and before I learned to adjust my speech rate to match my caller’s, southerners were constantly asking me to slow down. The only people I ever have to ask to slow down are New Yorkers, New Jerseyites, and Massachusians (or however you say that).
The French are the ones that talk fast. Andrunallthewordstogether. Like it’s a game they play so English speakers, even those with 4 years of high school French don’t have a chance of understanding them.
TV broadcasters have always talked really fast and becoming even bigger trend now. The high pitch talking among girls to sound more girly or sexy is big trend now.
Very annoying the TV broadcasters have really horrible way of speaking . There accent and the way they talk is horrible . They talk way too fast and way too high pitch way of talking.The gaps ,pauses and speed up is more of the sensational news . It like some one braking enter their house or a house fire and they are talking to 911 dispatch they so fast and high pitch ( when there is 911 emergency you talk really fast ) and like almost yelling
Here is example.
Note if people in the north part of the US talk fast like these TV broadcasters no way would I live there.
What do you mean can you explain . I don’t understand.
I’m not sure what you mean. The speech of newscaster is generally more rapid than that of someone narrating a documentary or many people speaking naturally. They may not be reducing the length of time for words and syllables, but eliminating the gaps increases the words per minute and would commonly be understood as fast talking. It’s not the same as the rapid talker in the old Fed Ex commercial, but it would certainly be considered fast talking.
I heard an audio clip once, of a Southern woman calling the FBI for some reason or other. She spoke so freaking slowly that I found myself unconsciously leaning forward and sitting on the edge of my seat in a futile attempt to urge her on to the next word and hopefully the end of the sentence.
This, it isn’t necessarily “slow talking” as much as it is drawing out the length of words. Although I’ve read an article that the stereotypical Southern accent, as heavily emphasized in films dating back to the 40s is now spoken by fewer than 2% of people in the American South and has mostly been replaced by other accents.
The South really has several large accent groups that media has gotten better at portraying, but at one time anyone South of the Mason-Dixon was presented in film and etc as having that very stereotypical Southern drawl.
So it’s similar to “RP” in England, which is considered the “standard accent of English spoken in England” and is mostly only actually heard by newscasters and people in media, and in that country is spoken by 3% of the population.
I don’t believe it’s a speech processing problem, that implies some alternate functionality in the brains of people based on the accent they have, which I do not believe is supported by science. Any healthy human’s brain is going to have a similar ability to process speech as any other human.
To people who are not accustomed to your accent it is often very difficult to understand. When I watch a movie set in South Boston I can typically understand it well enough but that’s a much milder accent than the real Boston accent. In Boston itself it is difficult to understand people because of the way they talk. They have very atypical ways of pronouncing words, they run words together and etc. So someone who speaks that way, I need them to slow down their speech because they speak so differently from me I need extra time to parse what they are saying from “Boston-ese” to what is to my ears “English.”
It’s like if you’re half-fluent in a language and a natural speaker of that language comes up to you. You need time to “work out” what they are saying because you’re not properly familiarized with the language. It has nothing to do with the relative speech-processing powers of you or the foreign language speaker, and most likely in the converse they would need you to speak slowly as well.
For example Mexicans don’t speak particularly fast, I can understand some Spanish, but not enough to converse at “normal speed.” I’d need someone to slow down so that I could review and mentally “work out” what they’ve said. But that has nothing to do with speech processing speed.
I am a product of growing up in the Army. As an Army brat I have lived in Georgia, Germany, Alabama, Alaska, and Tennessee. Even tough I have mainly lived most of my life in the South, I have some of my clients, mostly from NE Arkansas, tell me I need to slow down when I am talking to them because they can’t understand me when I am talking “so fast.” The problem with that is, as a sales rep, I don’t have half a day to shoot the shiz with one good ol’ boy when I could be seeing 5 clients a day! Ergh, the pains of working in the South
I don’t understand. That’s basically how all languages are spoken. The words run together–you don’t actually “hear” the spaces between words, for the most part.
I am from Texas and went to philly last month. Everyone I spoke to I had to say excuse me or im sorry can you repeat. It seemed tho certain parts people spoke super fast and other parts people spoke my speed.
I was in the South (Florida, FWIW) for 10 years in the late 50s and early 60s. I am from Colorado and don’t consider myself to be a fast talker. However, for the entire time I was there, I constantly anticipated what the native person was going to say next; and was usually wrong.
But, I did have time to think for awhile while they were talking.
I grew up in St. Louis, MO and went to work in Paducah, KY, which is about 175 miles south of St. Louis. Everyone in Paducah complained I talked too fast. After a year in Paducah, I came back to St. Louis and all my friends complained I talked too slowly.
And the Paducah natives complained that the folks in Tennessee talked too slowly.
I moved from Pittsburgh to Houston for 9 years and noticed a major difference in speaking speed. I found myself constantly either biting my tongue or jumping in to finish sentences for people. I never did get used to how slow everyone spoke. I think it’s the heat.
Also, the Texans I knew had a habit of what I called “using a paragraph where a word would do.” For example, a lady came up to me at work and asked if we had a particular item in stock. I said, “No.” Soon afterward I was called into the office by my manager and told not to be so rude to the customers. In Texas (Houston, anyway) you don’t simply say “no” you say, “No, Ma’am, we sure don’t.”
