Pausing to breathe and the speech-language relationship in production

Competing hypotheses on the coordination of breathing and language structure in speech originate from vertical versus horizontal perspectives on the speech-language relationship. The vertical hypothesis assumes that inhalations occur where long pauses are licensed by language factors (e.g., boundary strength) with the probability of inhalation increasing with pause duration. The horizontal hypothesis assumes that inhalation is tied to the cognitive demands of language planning such that the probability of inhalation increases with these demands. These predictions were tested in spontaneous and rote speech. In Experiment 1, mini-narratives were elicited from 40 speakers under two planning conditions: one where causal links between pictured events were either obvious (baseline) or not (planning-intensive). Pause duration increased with planning demands; inhalation frequency did not. When pauses with inhalation were removed from the analysis, pause duration only varied with linguistic boundary strength in the planning-intensive condition. Experiment 2 was designed to test the for a link between the cognitive demands of planning and inhalation. Twenty four speakers produced 12 repetition of a sequence of 20 long and short sentences grouped into several thematic chunks. No matter the prosodification of target sentences during elicitation, the probability of inhalation was higher before long target sentences than before short ones; it was also higher at the onset of a thematic group of sentences than within the group. Taken together, the study findings suggest that inhalations are coordinated with language structure based on a link between breathing and cognitive processing.