New Machine Will Help Speed Speech

Someday you may be able to sit back in Lowell Lecture Hall and hear a taped lecture delivered faster than you could read it.

Spoken speeds up to 700 words a minute have been produced by an experimenter at the Graduate School of Education on specially prepared tapes. When forty-nine Cliffies listened to the tapes last spring, they could understand short simple sentences after only 30 minutes of practice.

Normal speech proceeds at a rate of about 175 words a minute," said H. Les'ie Cramer, the Ed School graduate student conducting the experiment yesterday. "But each sound lasts twenty times as long as is necessary."

By removing every other 35 milliseconds of sound from a regular speed tape. Cramer can produce speech at double speed. Removing more tape segments speeds the speech up even more. Yet the speech is still of normal pitch and none of the vital parts of words are obliterated.

The task of cutting hour lectures down to 15 minutes poses some special problems. "Long complicated sentences." he explained, "tend to break down much faster than short, simple ones at speeded rates." Cramer is attempting to prove, however, that speeded speech, like speeded reading, increases the level of retention and comprehension.

Cramer entered the Ed School after becoming interested in the communication problems that developed during a water fluoridation controversy in his home town. Needham. His advisor. John B. Carroll, Roy E. Larsen Professor of Educational Psychology, was the first to interest Cramer in speeded speech research.

The Library of Congress is experimenting with speeded recordings of literature for the blind. The government also uses the process, Cramer said, "to review the taped information they have gathered. In fact, they've asked me to work for them.