The Respiratory Foundations of Spoken Language

Abstract

Why is breathing relevant in linguistics? In this review, we approach this question from different perspectives. The most popular view is that breathing adapts to speech because respiratory behavior has astonishing flexibility. We review research that shows that breathing pauses occur mostly at meaningful places, that breathing adapts to cognitive load during speech perception, and that breathing adapts to communicative needs in dialogue. However, speech may also adapt to breathing (e.g., the larynx can compensate for air loss, breathing can partially affect f0 declination). Enhanced breathing control may have played a role in vocalization and language evolution. These views are not mutually exclusive but, rather, reveal that speech production and breathing have an interwoven relationship that depends on communicative and physical constraints. We suggest that breathing should become an important topic for different linguistic areas and that future work should investigate the interaction between breathing and speech in different situational contexts.