Chinese speaking times

This paper presents the results of elemental standard Chinese speaking times per character and explores the factors that may affect these results. Over a million characters were recorded in the study. The collected data was analyzed with analysis of variance and the results showed that average speaking times for Cantonese and Mandarin are different. It is about 231ms/character for Cantonese and 224ms/character for Mandarin. An interesting dimension of this research is the interaction of language with factors of time session, format, gender and news category. This study indicates that these factors needed to be considered during compilation of standard speaking time for use. The result of this study is useful in generating a new and important category of communication basic times for standardizing and evaluating speech performance of workers in this competitive century. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.