Temporal Patterns of Cognitive Activity and Breath Control in Speech

Two aspects of spontaneous speech, the cognitive and the syntactic, were examined as potential regulators of the incidence of breathing during speech. During passages of prose read aloud breaths were taken exclusively at gaps in speech designated as grammatical junctures. During samples of spontaneous speech approximately one third of the breaths were taken at gaps in speech which could not be so described. The sequential temporal structuring of spontaneous speech reveals passages which appear principally to be given over to decisions about content alternating with fluent passages which appear to be the product of the preceding passage. Passages primarily characterised by cognition have a significantly lower proportion of breaths taken at grammatical junctures than the more fluent passages.