This post documents one small step in a larger plan for improved evaluation of prosody in reading. It compares word-level timing in a large number of recordings, from the Speech Accent Archive at GMU, of 3038 people reading the 69-word "Please call Stella" passage . 661 of these people are native speakers of English, with accents from all over the anglophone world, while the remaining 2377 readers have native languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. The reading and speaking level of those non-native readers varies a lot, and many of them have problems in decoding or pronunciation that affect their timing. Automated analysis of such problems should be useful in foreign-language teaching. And similar analyses might help in early reading instruction for students in anglophone classrooms, whatever their native language. Let's start with a quick comparison of word-level timing in the 661 native English speakers ; the 85 native French speakers ; the 99 native Korean speakers ; and the 82 native russian speakers .…