Characteristics of saliva swallowing in the reading of prepared texts
Kuniko Kakita, Shizuo Hiki · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
This study examines the nature of saliva swallowing during speech production. Speakers read two contrasting types of texts, a “paragraph” and a “list.” The “paragraph” was a Japanese version of “The North Wind and the Sun,” consisting of four sub-paragraphs. The “list” was a simple repetition of quasi-identical short sentences, without any paragraph construction. Simultaneous recordings of speech sounds (via microphone), swallow sounds (via laryngeal contact microphone), and respiratory movements of the thorax and abdomen (via respiratory belt transducers) were obtained and analyzed, especially in relation to sentence-final pauses. Preliminary results indicate that (1) swallowing tends to occur roughly in the middle of a pause and is followed by inspiration for the upcoming utterance, (2) inspiration is generally deeper when preceded by swallowing, (3) swallowing adds approximately one second to a pause, and (4) in paragraph reading, swallowing is more likely to occur during a pause between two sub-paragraphs, i.e., at a topic transition, whereas in list reading, swallowing reflects speakers' physiological needs more directly.