Characterizing the coordination of speech production and breathing
Jeffrey Kallay, Melissa A. Redford, Ulrich Mayr · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2018
A robust, positive correlation between inhalation depth and subsequent utterance length in read speech has been interpreted as an anticipatory effect. Since anticipatory posturing of the respiratory system during phrase preparation has important theoretical implications, the present study was designed to rigorously test the effect. Healthy college-aged participants learned by rote a passage with equal numbers of short and long sentences, which were randomized to create a zero (lag-1) autocorrelation sequence that controlled for priming effects. Rote learning was used to control for visual cues to utterance length. Multiple repetitions of the passage produced by six speakers were acoustically segmented into pause-speech intervals for preliminary analyses, with pause intervals coded for breath intake or no intake. Analyses on data that retained the experimental structure indicated a strong effect of preceding utterance length on the presence/absence of breath intake, but no effect of subsequent utterance length. Analyses of breath pause durations indicated only significant negative correlations with utterance length, and no relation between intake duration and utterance length. Together, the results suggest only an effect of physiological recovery on speech breathing under conditions that better approximate spontaneous production than in previous studies. [Work supported in part by NIH award number R01HD087452.]