The interaction of respiratory drive and linguistic structure
Grant L. McGuire, Sam Tilsen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2007
During high respiratory drive competition between the need for oxygen and the needs of speech breathing are in conflict. This conflict provides a way of exploring linguistic structure in two domains. Syntactically, talkers must breath more frequently such that inhalations occur within sentences, a rarity in Collins 1979, Doust & Patrick 1981, Bailey & Hoit 2002). Phonetically, high respiratory drive provides competition between between the high expiratory airflow rates needed to purge carbon dioxide and the high subglottal pressure necessary for phonation. This paper presents acoustic and physiological data from a study where American English talkers are exercised until in high respiratory drive and asked to read a syntactically-controlled passage. Preliminary results suggest that even in high respiratory drive, subjects respect constituency structure such that higher level phrase boundaries are correlated with more frequent inhalations. Further, subjects show less control over vocal fold control and must periodically exhale excess carbon dioxide, resulting in acoustic effects on the preceding word.