Distributional patterning of reflex cough during telephone conversations

Abstract

Reflex cough and speech are two behaviors that make use of the same end effectors—the respiratory and vocal tract subsystems. How do talkers engaged in conversation resolve conflicts between the communicative necessities involved in speech planning and their physiological reflexes? Coughing is a complex reflex arc triggered in the airway that leads to an urge to cough and, at some latency, the deployment of a coordinated vocal-respiratory response to that urge. However, research on factors that influence urge-cough latency is limited. Hypothesizing that talkers may actively delay coughing, this present study examines 200 instances of reflex cough from the Switchboard and CallHome corpora of spontaneous, dyadic telephone speech. Coughing events in both corpora are always flanked by acoustic silences, with the majority of coughing events occurring at interlocutor turn exchanges. Assuming that urges to cough can arise at anytime, we interpret the restriction of cough occurrence to pauses and turns as evidence that talkers can and do delay coughing until the end of their intonational phrases or to floor exchanges with their interlocutor. This further indicates a degree of linkage between the non-speech motor system and the prosodic speech planning system. [Work supported by NIH.]