Research projects

Ongoing projects

Do Danes speak more quickly than Swedes?

This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) between these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of read sentences. The results from the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish do. The finding that syllable deletion processes take place in Danish that do not occur in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The finding that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts is also viewed as a potentially contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.