ABSTRACT
For four decades researchers have investigated whether reducing the amount of time devoted to delivering any given message produced a more efficient educational process. The idea was to identify the rate of speech that maintained student comprehension levels without allowing the student’s mind to wander. Basically, the significance of studying accelerated speech rate effects involved a quest to maximize the amounts of material that could be presented and learned due to increased content knowledge requirements in most disciplines and fields. The research conducted so far suggests there is a threshold in terms of speech rate to optimize listening recall and retention. Yet, research results vary in terms of their identification of optimal rates of speech compression to maximize learning.
