A common folk psychology assumption is that within relatively normal rates of speech, a rapid rate ought to result in more problems of comprehension. For example, Fox Tree (1999) found that people listening to tapes of monologues and dialogues understood the dialogues better. One possible explanation for this result is that rate of speech is higher in monologues, so that comprehension falls off due to factors such as worsened enunciation. She was able to eliminate this account of her findings because rate of speech turned out to be slower in monologues. In contrast, an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 reported on efforts to train actors to deliver lines at a fairly rapid pace: "Fast talk is also a way for broadcast networks to make shows seem edgy when they can't feature the sex, violence and bad language of HBO."
We report here some preliminary research on comprehension and rate of speech, inspired in part by Fox Tree's finding that dialogues were better understood and featured faster speech. The alternative hypothesis we explore is that faster (but still normal) rates of speech may engage enhanced attentional processing, resulting in better comprehension. Support for this hypothesis would suggest that rate of speech may indeed have accounted for Fox Tree's finding, at least in part, contrary to a claim that the interactive negotiation in a dialogue inadvertently results in better audience design due to feedback alerting speakers that their descriptions may be less transparent to others than they think.