Breath Group Analysis for Reading and Spontaneous Speech in Healthy Adults

The breath group can serve as a functional unit to define temporal and fundamental frequency (f0) features in continuous speech. These features of the breath group are determined by the physiologic, linguistic, and cognitive demands of communication. Reading and spontaneous speech are two speaking tasks that vary in these demands and are commonly used to evaluate speech performance for research and clinical applications. The purpose of this study is to examine differences between reading and spontaneous speech in the temporal and f0 aspects of their breath groups.