Physiological correlates of loud speech: Respiratory and intraoral pressure data

Abstract

Many previous studies have investigated how increased loudness affects speech production behavior, but authors have varied widely in the measures they have used, and few studies have systematically assessed relationships among respiratory, laryngeal, and acoustic measures. In this work, we present respiratory and aerodynamic (intraoral pressure) data on eleven German-speaking women who produced speech in regular and loud conditions in three different tasks: Reading short sentences, responding to questions, and producing spontaneous speech. Loudness variation was assessed naturalistically by varying speaker-experimenter distance. Respiratory behavior was assessed using inductance plethysmography, and intraoral pressure was obtained via a pressure transducer affixed to the hard palate. In the respiratory data, we measured inspiratory magnitude as well as the slope of the inspiratory and expiratory phases. In the intraoral pressure data, we searched automatically for the peak pressure value during plosives anterior to the transducer (viz., bilabials and alveolars). These physiological data will be related to previously-presented data on speech acoustics to begin to disentangle respiratory and supraglottal contributions to the characteristics of loud speech.