Marlee White Conrad, B., Thalacker, S. & Schnle, P. (1983). Speech respiration as an indicator of integrative contextual processing.

Folia Phoniatrica, 35, 220-225. Breathing, which supports the gas exchanges vital to life, and providing airflow and continuous air pressure for speech production are the two key functions of the respiratory system. Inhaling and exhaling during speech is an unconscious and involuntary act that for multiple types of speech occurs differently; such as pausing to take a breath during counting happens because the body is in need of a gas-exchange. I believe the authors gave a simple enough background on how speech and respiration interact; though they also had many questions to find out why else speech-production, besides gas-exchange, is interrupted by inhalation and exhalation. The purpose of this study was to look at speech and respiration mechanisms and see how they work together or interfere with each other. The subjects for this study consisted of 15 medical graduate students in good health condition. The researchers used chest pneumograph, which indicates changes to the circumference of the thorax, to measure the respiration of each participant and this had a resistance transducer connected to it to convert the heart percussions to electronic signals. A polygraph with a high sensitive microphone and tape recorder was also used to register voice signals and phonograms. The procedure began with each participants sitting in chair with chest pneumographs attached to them. They were then asked to read eight different texts from a screen out loud in their normal voice. Each of the eight texts contained about 100 syllables and was made up so that each varied in where commas, ands or/and full stops were placed to signal the end of sentences while text 7 was one run-on text. The reason for the different text structures was so the researchers could attempt to determine the how the variation affected speech breathing patterns. Measuring the times where the participants inhaled/exhaled was the studies dependent variable. The independent variable for this study was the text structures and how the researchers controlled where the participants should have inhaled and exhaled throughout their speech. The results were stated clearly and factually, though the researchers did not discuss individual factors only the averages that occurred. This study resulted in demonstrating that text positions and the punctuation used throughout can be determined as strong to weak stimuli for inhaling/exhaling. The overall notion that came out was that full stops combined with paragraph form were the strongest stimulus for rebreathing, then full stops, next was a comma combined with and, then a comma and finally, an and. The tables and figures were difficult to understand because the legends and explanations were in Swedish and since I do not have any knowledge about the Swedish language were not very helpful to me. There is no statistical significance discussed in the results section; the only numbers are percentages that are used to give the average amount for how many of the participants rebreathed at full stops, commas and etc