Breathing and speech planning in turn-taking

This paper investigates breathing profiles in eleven female speakers (subjects) when talking successively with the same two females (partners). Breathing kinematics of the two interlocutors was recorded synchronously by means of two Inductance Plethysmographs. In order to understand the implication of breathing in dialogue, we analyzed changes in breathing pauses according to the main dialogue events (listening, backchannels, turns start and turns continuation). Breathing and syllable rates were also compared among partners and subjects. The duration of inhalations and related pauses was reduced before a turn continuation in comparison to a turn start. The delay between speech offset in a breathing cycle and the onset of the next inhalation increased when a speaker and a listener swap roles as compared to a speaker who continued the turn. This was observed for both partners and subjects. The partners differed in their breathing and articulation rates but the two rates were not clearly correlated. In agreement with previous works, the current study shows that breathing kinematics is strongly linked to dialogue events. However, it doesn't show any clear effect of partner on speaker's breathing. This last result is discussed relative to methodological aspects.

This paper investigates the relation between the linguistic structure of the breath group and breathing kinematics in spontaneous speech. 26 female speakers of German were recorded by means of an Inductance Plethysmograph. The breath group was defined as the interval of speech produced on a single exhalation. For each group several linguistic parameters (number and type of clauses, number of syllables, hesitations) were measured and the associated inhalation was characterized. The average duration of the breath group was ~3.5 s. Most of the breath groups consisted of 1-3 clauses; ~53% started with a matrix clause; ~24% with an embedded clause and ~23% with an incomplete clause (continuation, repetition, hesitation). The inhalation depth and duration varied as a function of the first clause type and with respect to the breath group length, showing some interplay between speech-planning and breathing control. Vocalized hesitations were speaker-specific and came with deeper inhalation....

2011

Noises made before the acoustic onset of speech are typically ignored, yet may reveal aspects of speech production planning and be relevant to discourse turn-taking. We quantify the nature and timing of such noises, using an experimental method designed to elicit naturalistic yet controlled speech initiation data. Speakers listened to speech input, then spoke when prompt material became visible onscreen. They generally inhaled audibly before uttering a short sentence, but not before a single word. In both tasks, articulatory movements caused acoustic spikes due to weak click-like articulatory separations or stronger clicks via an ingressive, lingual airstream. The acoustic onset of the sentences was delayed relative to the words. This does not appear to be planned, but seems a side-effect of the longer duration of inhalation.

Brain and Language, 2002

This article is concerned with the role of prosody in discourse. Three experiments explored the relationship between inspiration, declination, and syntactic boundaries in normal and RHD participants. Fundamental frequency and intensity were measured at the beginning and end of breath units excised from conversational samples. The results revealed evidence of declination of intensity in all samples measured. However, resetting of fundamental frequency was observed only in the samples of normal participants and then only when a breath coincided with the beginning of a sentence. The results suggest that resetting and declination play separate roles in discourse parsing. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

Interspeech 2015, 2015

This study investigates timing of communicative behaviour with respect to speaker's respiratory cycle. The data is drawn from a corpus of multiparty conversations in Swedish. We find that while longer utterances (> 1 s) are tied, predictably, primarily to exhalation onset, shorter vocalisations are spread more uniformly across the respiratory cycle. In addition, nods, which are free from any respiratory constraints, are most frequently found around exhalation offsets, where respiratory requirements for even a short utterance are not satisfied. We interpret the results to reflect the economy principle in speech production, whereby respiratory effort, associated primarily with starting a new respiratory cycle, is minimised within the scope of speaker's communicative goals.

Folia Phoniatrica et …, 2010

PLOS ONE

We know that speech planning in conversational turn-taking can happen in overlap with the previous turn and research suggests that it starts as early as possible, that is, as soon as the gist of the previous turn becomes clear. The present study aimed to investigate whether planning proceeds all the way up to the last stage of articulatory preparation (i.e., putting the articulators in place for the first phoneme of the response) and what the timing of this process is. Participants answered pre-recorded quiz questions (being under the illusion that they were asked live), while their tongue movements were measured using ultrasound. Planning could start early for some quiz questions (i.e., midway during the question), but late for others (i.e., only at the end of the question). The results showed no evidence for a difference between tongue movements in these two types of questions for at least two seconds after planning could start in early-planning questions, suggesting that speech p...

Speech Prosody 2018, 2018

This paper introduces the first study on the coordination between breathing and speech in Brazilian Portuguese. Four subjects (two males and two females) were recorded by using the RespTrack device, which allows the measurement of the breathing cycle and the simultaneous recording of speech. In order to shed light on the interplay between the two activities, three speaking styles were investigated: reading, narration and commentary of story characters. Five parameters were measured: breath cycle duration, duration and amplitude of inhalation, duration to speech onset from onset of breath cycle or from peak of inhalation. Results showed stylistic and gender differences: coordination differs between reading and the other two styles; breath cycles are shorter by 1 to 1.5 second in reading; commentary does not differ between the two genders for four out of five parameters; differences between males and females are found in four out of five parameters measured, excepted breath cycle dura...

When speakers engage in conversation, acoustic features of their utterances sometimes converge. We examined how the speech rate of participants changed when a confederate spoke at fast or slow rates during readings of scripted dialogues. A beat tracking algorithm extracted the periodic relations between stressed syllables (beats) from acoustic recordings. The mean inter-beat interval (IBI) between successive stressed syllables was compared across speech rates. Participants’ IBIs were smaller in the fast condition than the slow condition; the difference between participants’ and the confederate’s IBIs decreased across utterances. Cross-correlational analyses demonstrated mutual influences between speakers, with greater impact of the confederate on participants’ beat rates than vice versa. Beat rates converged in scripted conversations, suggesting speakers mutually entrain to one another’s beat.