Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of theindividual in sound change processes. Do fast speakers have aunique role in sound change processes? Fast speech leads togreater rates of lenition (reduction). But should it mean thatfast talkers would be more likely to lenite even when speak-ing slowly? In two corpus studies we show that even whenfast talkers speak more slowly they are (a) more likely to omitsegments and (b) more likely to perform variable reduction ofconsonants. This draws attention to habitual speech rate as alikely factor in the actuation of lenition processes.

We present data on convergence in the Switchboard corpus, ad-dressing differences across measures and across speakers. Wemeasured convergence in four characteristics, to test consis-tency in related and unrelated measures: F0 median, F0 vari-ance, speech rate, and odds of the fillers uh and um. Conver-gence was significant in all measures and exhibited variationboth between individuals and within individuals. Most notably,convergence in one measure was not predictive of convergencein other measures, except between closely related measures.The results demonstrate some of the limitations of generaliz-ing convergence results from one measure to other measures.