Exploring speaker fluency with phonologically annotated ICE corpora

This study demonstrates how quantitative characteristics of speaker fluency can be measured in the phonologically annotated and time-aligned corpora ICE-Nigeria and ICE-Scotland, which belong to the ‘new generation’ of ICE corpora. Some files from the categories broadcast talk and unscripted speeches in ICE Nigeria and ICE Scotland were phonemically annotated and analysed, and for each speaker the mean length of run (= average number of words per utterance) and articulation rate (= mean number of phonemes per total articulation time) were calculated. These results show how phonological and time-aligned annotations can enrich ICE corpora, and how they allow comparisons of varieties of English that go beyond studies of syntactic and lexical variation.