Rapid Speech?

When you speak quickly, there is more going on than just speeding up.

If you want to speak quickly, you soon reach the point at which you cannot articulate the individual sounds rapidly enough to make the words you want to make. It is not a matter of 'laziness'; it is simply impossible for a normal person to speak that quickly without altering parts of the words. The changes you end up making are a result of natural processes which arise from the shape of your mouth an dthroat.

Here is an example.

Listen to this person saying 'Did you eat yet?" at a normal pace. The utterance takes about 1,030 MS, 1.03 seconds. (NB: The odd sounds in the recordings here are due to file compression necessary for rapid downloading).

As you might expect, speaking the word faster saves some time. the next utterance takes 600 MS, about 0.6 seconds, a savings of about two fifths of a second.

To do this, the speaker changes the pronunciation. Listen to the differences in the consonants used, and notice that it still sounds pretty natural.

Is it possible to make the utterance that quickly without changing the character of the consonants? Thanks to sound editing software, yes, it certainly is.

We sped the first utterance up to 600 MS milliseconds to match number 2, leaving the pitch the same. Have a listen. How does it sound to you?