Journal of Medical College Chandigarh, 2011, Vol. 2, No.1 1 Corresponding Author : Ravi Kapoor Audiologist cum Speech Therapist Department of ENT, 3rd Floor B Block, Govt. Medical College Hospital, Chandigarh,India E-mail: ravikapoor2002@yahoo.co.in Original Article Rate of Speech of Punjabi Speaking Children Ravi Kapoor, Gurvinder Jit Kaur, Surinder K Singhal, Arjun Dass Department of E.N.T & Head Neck Surgery, Govt. Medical College & Hospital, Chandigarh, India ABSTRACT The rate of speech is one of the important aspects of speech that affects both fluency and intelligibility. Studying rate of speech is important because it may be deviated in many speech-language disorders such as stuttering. The aim of present study was to find the normal rate of speech of Punjabi speaking children.Forty subjects (20 males and 20 females) in the age range of 10-14 years participated in the study. All the subjects were native Punjabi speakers and had normal speech fluency. It was investigated whether their speech rate differed in various speech tasks, that is, reading, picture description and spontaneous speech.The results obtained showed that the rate of speech was in the range of 148-216 words-per-minute (wpm) during reading; 139-171wpm during picture description and 127-156 wpm during spontaneous speech. The rate of speech of male children does not differ significantly from female children. The rate of speech in reading was highest. It was significantly higher in reading than picture description and spontaneous speech for both male and female children. The difference was not significant for the tasks of picture description and spontaneous speech.The rate of speech of Punjabi speaking children was highest for the speech task of reading followed by picture description and then by spontaneous speech. Either of the speech tasks could be used to assess rate of speech. Keywords: Rate of speech, stuttering, Punjabi INTRODUCTION Speech is a unique character of human beings. It is the audible manifestation of language and serves the purpose of communication. Normally acceptable speech should, apart from other aspects, be fluent and intelligible. The speed with which a speaker speaks, that is, the rate of speech is one of the important aspects of speech that affects both fluency and intelligibility. The rate of speech may be defined as the number of linguistic output units, words or syllables, per unit time, including pause interval which may separate uninterrupted articulatory sequence 1 . In speech-language pathology, studying rate of speech is important because in many speech-language disorders rate of speech deviates from the normal. These disorders include fluency disorders such as stuttering 2 , neurogenic language disorders and some motor speech disorders. Rate of speech is generally expressed in range. Reported normal speaking rate in English language is in the range of 115 to 165 words per minute and 162 to 230 syllables per minute 3 , whereas normal reading rate has a range of 150 to 190 words per minute and 210 to 265 syllables per minute. 4 In Western literature, several studies related to rate of speech in different languages have been done for establishing normative values for various groups of speakers and for different speaking tasks. 5,6 In Indian languages, studies with respect to rate of speech have been carried out in Kannada, Marathi, Oriya languages 7, 8 . The norms of one language cannot be used for another language because of differences in the sociolinguistic environment and probable differences in the neuromuscular skills. Kaushal et al 9 studied rate of speech for adults in Punjabi.To the best of our knowledge, there has been no exclusive study done for establishing rate of speech for Punjabi speaking children population. AIM The aim of present study was to obtain the rate of speech of Punjabi speaking children having normal speech fluency. PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com