Variability and Consistency in Speech Breathing During Reading

Lung volumes during reading and associated factors such as speech intensity and linguistic influences were studied in six healthy young women over 7 to 10 sessions, using respiratory inductive plethysmography. Intrasubject variability of lung volumes over the sessions was almost as great as the intersubject variability. Some of the intrasubject variability was associated with natural variations of speech intensity within a "comfortable loudness" range. The lung volume variability during reading is contrasted with high degrees of both inter- and intrasubject consistency in the location of inspirations, which occurred almost exclusively at grammatically appropriate places in the texts (paragraph, sentence, clause, and phrase boundaries). Within each reading passage, lung volumes were significantly increased for (a) louder utterances, (b) inspirations at sentence and paragraph boundaries compared to inspirations at other locations within sentences, (c) longer utterances compared to shorter utterances, and (d) initial breaths compared to final breaths. The implications of these findings for the neural control of breathing during speech are considered.