A survey of respiratory system behavior during pauses in spontaneous speech.

Abstract

This work is part of an ongoing study to characterize respiratory system involvement during the generation of pauses in connected speech. At pauses, the speaker takes a breath or the speaker does not take a breath. Previously reported results for read speech observed that without‐breath pauses were generated with a sharp movement toward net inspiratory effort followed by a sharp return toward increased net expiratory effort [J. Slifka, In Dynamics of Speech Production and Perception (IOS, 2006), pp. 45‐58]. In the present work, 52 utterances of spontaneous speech from four speakers were analyzed. Behaviors in spontaneous speech include not only the activity similar to that observed for read utterances but also additional types of behaviors. Some without‐breath pauses were observed to have regions of oscillation in net effort. Such behavior appears to be more common during longer pauses and during hesitations. Secondly, some without‐breath pauses were generated with a reversed pattern—sharp movement toward...