Changes in breathing while listening to read speech: the effect of reader and speech mode

Abstract

The current paper extends previous work on breathing during speech perception and provides supplementary material regarding the hypothesis that adaptation of breathing during perception “could be a basis for understanding and imitating actions performed by other people” (Paccalin and Jeannerod, 2000). The experiments were designed to test how the differences in reader breathing due to speaker-specific characteristics, or differences induced by changes in loudness level or speech rate influence the listener breathing. Two readers (a male and a female) were pre-recorded while reading short texts with normal and then loud speech (both readers) or slow speech (female only). These recordings were then played back to 48 female listeners. The movements of the rib cage and abdomen were analyzed for both the readers and the listeners. Breathing profiles were characterized by the movement expansion due to inhalation and the duration of the breathing cycle. We found that both loudness and speech rate affected each reader’s breathing in different ways. Listener breathing was different when listening to the male or the female reader and to the different speech modes. However, differences in listener breathing were not systematically in the same direction as reader differences. The breathing of listeners was strongly sensitive to the order of presentation of speech mode and displayed some adaptation in the time course of the experiment in some conditions. In contrast to specific alignments of breathing previously observed in face-to-face dialog, no clear evidence for a listener–reader alignment in breathing was found in this purely auditory speech perception task. The results and methods are relevant to the question of the involvement of physiological adaptations in speech perception and to the basic mechanisms of listener–speaker coupling.

Take a breath and take the turn: how breathing meets turns in spontaneous dialogue

“…it was limited to short time-windows and was globally weak. In a previous study [26], we observed that when listening to a female reader, the breathing rate of a female listener increased when the reader increased her vocal effort, and decreased when the reader spoke slower as compared with normal speech. Although changes in listener breathing often followed in the direction of speaker breathing, they did not completely mirror it.…”

“…R. Soc. B 369: 20130399 investigate coordination between speakers and listeners from brain [38] and breathing [26,27] signals).…”

“…This situation was used to evaluate changes in subjects' behaviour according to their partners (as in [26,27], while [8,33] involved dyads with different people). The analyses were based on the identification of the breathing cycle (e.g.…”

“…The offset of inhalation was considered as the onset of the exhalation phase (E_on[n]), with the offset of the breathing cycle corresponding to the onset of the next inhalation (I_on[nþ1]) (see [26] for similar annotation methods). The breathing cycle was defined based on successive inhalation onsets, since the onset and offset of the exhalation phase are difficult to detect reliably [13,26]. Breathing cycles were also categorized in relation to the speech events they included.…”

“…In these studies of breathing during listening to speech, no overall imitation or coordination of breathing was found between listeners and speakers. This suggests that respiratory rhythm is sensitive to speech stimuli, and probably to attention or mental effort [25,26], but that listeners may not coordinate their breathing with speakers'. This result could be due to the fact that pure listening tasks require neither direct interaction nor joint action.…”